Horse harness

The gear between a rider and a horse is not one invention but a sequence. Each part of it changed what the rider could do. The bridle is placed in the Altai at about the seventh century BC. With control of the head came the free use of both hands, which is the precondition of shooting from horseback.^[1] The saddle spread the rider’s weight and let him stay mounted for days. The stirrup gave him a brace. With it he could strike as well as shoot.

None of these is a steppe monopoly, and the dating of each is argued. What is not argued is the order of consequence. The harness makes the horseman, the horseman makes the army, and the army makes the confederation.

The saddle of the nomads was built of wooden boards. It had a steep bridge-like bow in front of the seat and a rear bow that swings flat upward behind it. Wooden saddles or their metal fittings were found with the bone-plated bow at Noin Ula, at Kenkol and in Korea. The oldest datable ones, at Noin Ula and Kenkol, belong to about the birth of Christ. Roman units of mounted archers took the wooden saddle from the Parthians together with the reflex bow.^[2] The Huns used it too. Jordanes writes that Attila is said to have built a pyre of saddles on the Catalaunian Plains.^[3] Those can only have been wooden saddles.^[4] In the princely graves of the Hunnic age, from Borovoje in Kazakhstan to Mundolsheim near Strasbourg, the front bow of the saddle carried triangular gold plates. They were mostly stamped with a scale pattern, and they occur only in men’s graves.^[5] A saddle bow from the Göktürk-period graves of Kudyrge in the Altai shows a hunting scene with a tiger, a deer and a bear.^[6]

The riders drove their horses with a whip, the nagaika, and not with spurs, which the settled peoples used. Whips are found in late Sarmatian graves of the lower Volga and in graves of the Hunnic age at Sipovo, Novogrigorjevka and Musljumova.^[7] Bridles set with gold and stones, after Bosporan or Persian models, belong to the fifth century. In the graves the gold on them is paper-thin foil on a base of thin bronze, fixed with a few rivets. The bits, by contrast, are solid and were meant for use.^[8]

The graves of the Hunnic age give no trace of the stirrup. On the finds known in the 1950s, metal stirrups of iron and bronze came into central Europe with the Avars. In East Asia they were not securely attested before the fifth century. The hunting scenes on Sasanian silver bowls do not show them. Whether the Huns of Attila’s age used stirrups of wood, leather or hemp, or none, was left open.^[9] Paintings from the oasis of Turfan show riders with the foot in a stirrup of primitive form. One is an armoured rider on a white horse in a temple at Bezeklik, another is on a paper drawing from Yarkhoto.^[10] The paintings are undated. Therefore they are no evidence for the age of the Göktürks.^[10] Graves of the Göktürk period in the Altai and the Tian Shan hold iron stirrups of three types: with a round loop, with a small plate and with a large plate. They also hold bits with a jointed mouthpiece. A grave at Alamyshyk on the Naryn held the skeleton of a horse and a stirrup. The graves are dated only broadly, to the Göktürk period.^[11]

The tail of the horse served as a sign. One view derives the horse-tail standard from the custom of hanging the tail of a dead rider’s horse on a pole at his grave. The evidence for this custom is recent: it comes from the ethnography of the Kirghiz of the Tian Shan and from Turkic epic.^[12]

A runiform text from the Altai may name saddled horses. A split piece of rock with five lines of runes was found near the village of Jabogan in the Altai Republic. One line of it has been interpreted as naming three horses by colour, each with a saddle of a different metal: white with gold, dark grey with silver, brown with bronze.^[13] The editor gives no date for the stone.^[14]

The Kutadgu Bilig of 1069–1070 knows both the stirrup, üzeŋü, and the bridle, çigen. A proverb says that as long as there is a stirrup, one can hold the bridle tight.^[15]

References

^ Golden 1992
^ Werner 1956, p. 50–51
^ Jordanes; Mierow 1915, § 213, p. 110
^ Werner 1956, p. 51
^ Werner 1956, p. 52
^ Ögel 1984, p. 140–143
^ Werner 1956, p. 53–54
^ Werner 1956, p. 54–55
^ Werner 1956, p. 53
^ a b von Le Coq 1913, pl. 31, 48
^ Ögel 1984, p. 138, 162–163
^ Ögel 2000, p. 197–201
^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 45–46
^ Nevskaya 2012, p. 47
^ Kutadgu Bilig; Dankoff 1983, couplet 6110

Sources

Kutadgu Bilig
Jordanes (after Priscus and Ammianus Marcellinus)

Literature

Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
Charles Christopher Mierow, The Gothic History of Jordanes in English Version, with an Introduction and a Commentary (1915)
Joachim Werner, Beiträge zur Archäologie des Attila-Reiches (1956)
Albert von Le Coq, Chotscho. Facsimile-Wiedergaben der wichtigeren Funde der ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan (1913)
Bahaeddin Ögel, İslâmiyetten Önce Türk Kültür Tarihi. Orta Asya Kaynak ve Buluntularına Göre (1984)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş VI: Türklerde tuğ ve bayrak (2000)
Robert Dankoff (trans.), Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig): A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes (1983)
Irina Nevskaya, An Old Turkic Inscription Found in the Vicinity of the Village Jabogan of the Republic Altai: Its Paleographic Analisys and Reading (türkisch: Altay Cumhuriyeti Jabogan Kasabası Çevresinde Bulunan Eski Türkçe Bir Yazıt: Metin ve Paleografik İnceleme) (2012)