Horses and Empires

• Book: Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth Harl

Discussion

Venkatesh Raoon Horses and Empires:

"Early Iron Age warfare was chariot-based, and only later became mounted cavalry-based, because early horses were not strong enough to bear human riders. They could only draw chariots. It took centuries of selective breeding to produce cavalry mounts. This is counterintuitive. Chariots are visibly fairly complex material technology and seem like they should come after mounted riding. But getting to better horses through breeding is actually the more advanced technological accomplishment. Interestingly, horses originally evolved in the Americas but disappeared there until Europeans re-introduced them. When Native Americans developed a horse culture nearly overnight, it was powered by the human-bred Eurasian horse.

Sedentary civilizations could not figure out how to breed horses reliably, so their primary relationship with the steppe nomads was literally horse-trading, in exchange for civilizational core products like grain and luxury goods. This failure had subtle causes. In the case of the Chinese, for example, it was because the horse feed in China didn’t have sufficient selenium to breed strong horses. In other cases, the causes were more obvious: India has historically been a huge importer of horses because they simply don’t thrive naturally in the tropics.

You’ve probably noticed that images of steppe nomads feature cartoonishly large humans riding unusually high and forward. This is not bad artwork. That’s literally what they look like (look up modern Mongolian horse-riding videos). Steppe horses are shorter and smaller, but strong enough to bear humans, and with much higher endurance than the more stereotypical tall horses we’ve gotten used to. They can apparently gallop all day, albeit at a lower top speed than the fancier horses of sedentary civilizations. And the high-riding look is because the riders literally stand up fully, leaning forward in their stirrups, rather than sitting or hovering in the saddle. The stirrups (and kit generally) are also different, allowing the riders to control the horse with their feet alone, leaving the hands free for the archery they were famed for.

Each nomad went raiding or warring with a string of 3-5 (or even more) horses, changing frequently so they always had a fresh mount. And nomad groups had vast numbers of horses, as well as access to large wild/feral herds. Only a fraction of the horses were domesticated and trained. The stock was very low-cost but high quality, and basically free to maintain. The steppes provided the food, and the minimal domestication ensured that they mostly took care of themselves. For example, steppe nomad mounts are apparently not shod with iron horseshoes; they do whatever wild horses do to keep their hooves trimmed. This adds up to a picture where horses, despite being large animals, had unit economics resembling that of chickens in modern factory farms. This shows up in the attitudes of nomads. Though horses were prized and valued, they were treated like a cheap, high-volume commodity. You could say the relationship was one of harvesting from wild herds and practicing a kind of r-selection breeding rather than K-selection. By contrast, the heavy cavalry horses of medieval sedentary civilizations typically cost a fortune to train and maintain; a burden which could bankrupt poorer knights."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-steppe-function)