CHAPTER V.. The Horse in History.

THE HORSE IN HISTORY.

I. THE DAPPLED HORSE OF EUROPE.

THE BALTIC PEOPLE. The Baltic, which once drained through Lapland to the Arctic, became, as the icefields melted, a land-locked lake until a local sinkage of the rocks opened its Danish channels into the Atlantic. At the same period the North Sea was eating its way up the old vale of North River.

The melting of the icefields had left these Baltic and North-River Provinces of Cloudland an ill-drained country of bare rock wastes, of boulder tracts and clay, cluttered with lakes and swamps. It was long before its damp and frosty soils yielded a scanty crop, eight bushels of wheat, for instance, in Plantaganet England as compared with thirty-six bushels, the present average. The only wealth was that of fisheries in cold and deadly shallows.

Here, in a rapidly improving climate, was a school of manhood which educated poor savages who lived on shell-fish, driving them {112} by straits of famine to exercise a varied skill as fishers, hunters and farmers with the changing seasons. As these people always bred more bairns than they could feed, their overcrowding led to bickerings, and mutual recrimination weeded out all but the best fighters, while pestilence swept away those who were not not quite hardy. The blue-eyed, fair-haired ruddy folk of Cloudland grew tenacious of life, and very hard to kill, thrifty, austere, fiercely self-governing. Never has the world known men more formidable, adventurous, abler or more daring than these Vikings of the northern seas, and pioneers by land who set forth out of Cloudland to find homes. They had a strong preference for other people's homes.

To realise the temper of the Baltic, glance for a moment at the old quest for cod, and the curing stations for stock-fish which formed a series of stepping-stones to bridge the North Atlantic, and so led to the discovery of North America. The founding by blonde adventurers of the Hohenstaufen and Romanov dynasties, and of the British kingdom, are Baltic roots from whence have grown the German, Russian, British and American world powers holding dominion over half the Earth. All that steam is to the mechanism of the planet, or to {113} our own industrial engineering, the Baltic Force has been in history.

Long before the dawn of historic times the Baltic region was brewing human storms, which swept outward in all directions, but mainly into regions toward the sun. It is not blind accident which leads the modern Prussians to seize the coal and iron fields of Belgium, the oilfields of Galicia, or the copper mines of Serbia; for, not only are Baltic storms of overwhelming strength, they are organized by strategists, led by tacticians and concentrate attack upon the most useful countries.

Yet there is always a limitation to the Baltic conquests. When the blonde conquerors seized Greece or Italy, Spain or Asia Minor, districts enclosed by sea and mountain barriers they always held their own. When on the other hand they conquered a country open to attack such as Germany or Russia, Hungary or the Balkans the next wave of the Tartar Hordes has overwhelmed them by sheer weight of numbers. So the early Balkan conquests on the Mediterranean were cut off from the homeland by swarms of Asiatics whose dark haired descendants, known as the Alpine stock still hold large mountain regions from the Black Sea to the Rhone.

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Wherever the Baltic people hold their conquests in Asia, Europe, or America, a nation arises of mixed blood from their marriages with black-haired natives or fellow emigrants. A few centuries after the settlement, four hundred years or so, the austere republic, or monarchy of free men with a king as Leader, blossoms into a grand empire, ablaze with genius, rich, corrupt, decaying.

But, if the Baltic colonists have settled to sunward of the 49th parallel, the sunlight begins to affect the nerves of the blonde emigrants, to weaken the children, to give a feverish energy to business, to kill off the unsheltered outdoor workers, and emasculate the sheltered aristocracy. A few centuries later the dark-haired natives of the region have time once more to resume their ancient habit of sitting in the sun. They made the statues and portraits of fair gods and saints, blonde kings and heroes. "Once upon a time," they say, "we had Olympic games. Our cavalry were irresistible. We ruled the entire world!" But the race of the blonde conquerors has perished from among them, gone like last winter's snow save for a few surviving aristocrats, and some poor melting drifts of peasantry up in the {115} mountain valleys where there are clouds for shelter.

THE HELLENIC HORSEMEN. While the Baltic region itself was still sub-arctic, perhaps with no horse-stock as yet much better than Celtic ponies, the oak woods of the Danube valley were breeding sturdy Dapples, while the Tartar hordes with each invasion scattered Duns as far as central France. Even the white horse of the Southern steppes, rare and held sacred by the Northern people, was known in Central Europe. So when the fair Achaeans came to Greece they brought not Celtic ponies but Duns, and a few Dapples picked up upon their journeys.

In the sagas of the Northmen, as in the legends of Achaean Greece the blue-eyed, ruddy, tawny hero makes love or war to worship a fair woman. The vein is epic, but there is a difference of mood; for in the North its atmosphere is one of gloom and terror shadowed by awful Fate, but in the south of sunny splendour, gallantry, and joy. The theme of the winged horse has its weird Valkyrs riding to find the slain through battlefields at night, and its gay flying Pegasus in the Sahara, who will not be caught save with a golden bridle made by magic.

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The Ocean God gave Peleus a chariot team "Dapple" and "Dun" by name, both with great flowing manes, "swift as the winds, the horses that the harpy, Podarge bare to the West Wind as she was grazing on the meadow beside the stream of Oceanus." Peleus lent the team to his son Achilles. Then Achilles' charioteer was killed in battle, and the horses mourned. "Hot tears," says Homer, "flowed from their eyes to the ground as they mourned for their charioteer." The fellow used to oil their manes, poor dears. They wept from the eyes, and not, as modern horses do, from the nostrils. But then you see they were not ordinary horses, because their mother was a harpy (vide books on Unnatural History), and their sire was the West Wind. They were foaled on the shores of the Western ocean: Dapple of the woods, Dun of the grass lands. And Pegasus was a Bay from Africa. So one finds in the oldest myths of the Hellenes record of the three primary stocks from whom all modern breeds are descended.

To these Hellenes the hearth, the log cabin and the mother were sacred, the bases of all religion. The hearth became an altar, the cabin a glorious temple of white marble, the mother a goddess whose statue was ivory and {117} her robes of massive gold. Outside their holy faith nothing was taken very seriously, and the people had special delight in nonsense animals. The centaur or man-horse was a prime favourite, and they did not worry over his stable management, a most revolting job. The man mouth would refuse the forage urgently required by the horse-body, and if they compromised on oats as porridge, even that would pall. Still centaurs would be gentle, and less likely to butt, than the buck unicorn of our own mythology. The Centaur Cheiron indeed was not only gentle but the eminent headmaster of the earliest public school. Solving the diet question with fish, game, fruit and wine, he lived to a good old age.

For a people of so lively a mind as the Greeks, progress was rather slow in the use of horses. Supposing the siege of Troy to have happened about 1000 B.C. they were solely dependent on chariotry in war while King Solomon had 12,000 cavalry.

Three centuries later the Greek colonists of African Cyrene, that "city of fair steeds and goodly chariots," sent home shipments by direct sea trade of desert Bays for breeding. With the improvement of the horse stock four-horse chariots began to compete in the Olympic {118} Games of B.C. 680. By B.C. 640 the ridden horse had become of consequence enough to share the great honours of the Olympiad, but still the tactical use of cavalry was delayed. Greece is a small rough country much broken by sea channels, and no more suitable than Scotland for the effective use of the mounted arm in war. So, even as late as the Battle of Marathon, the Persian Horse found the Hellenic army afoot; not until the fifth century was the Greek Cavalry of any consequence.

In the Greek statuary of the Great Age we see the Hellenic horses clearly as though they lived. The chariot horse was a noble half-bred carriage animal standing at least sixteen hands. The cavalry remount stood about fourteen hands with a head of unmistakeable breeding from the Bay, and a general chunky comfortable build which suggests the Dapple, but certainly not the Dun who had served with the heroes of the Achaean age. The Welsh pit pony, used as a yeomanry remount, exactly corresponds with Xenophon's careful description of the ideal cavalry horse. "A double back," says he, "that is, when the flesh rises on both sides of the spine, is much softer to sit upon, and more pleasing to the eye than a single one." That was before the days of {119} saddles, and horsemen had tender interest in the double back--the characteristic back of dappled horses. Of the Hellenic seat we will speak in the chapter on straight-leg riding.

Among all ancient horsemen the great problem was to reserve both hands for the use of weapons. This involved a life training in steering by pressure of the knee or calf, but dressing in military formation was still impossible without control of the horse's mouth. Many nations used a nose-band, or a twitch round the lower jaw, and a head-rope for steering; but still in practice the formation would be that of a mob. So Xenophon seems to have borrowed the bitt from the chariot harness, using a rough one for breaking, and a smoother kind for trained horses. His illustrious cavalry owed their prestige and power to a proper formation, and ingenious tactics.

THE ROMAN HORSEMEN. The Romans of historic times were descended from a fair race of the Baltic region, and the blonde aristocracy still ruled among a dark Mediterranean population. Their culture was adopted, and mainly Greek. Their original Dun and Dapple horse stock was crossed from early ages with African blood, and as time went on they commanded the use of every decent horse strain in {120} the world. Their officials were Curules as a class from the word Currus for chariot, whose seats of office were chariot chairs, and their state allowances included chariot horses. Their gentry were known as equites or horsemen. They developed a mania for chariot racing, and their four factions known from the racing colours blue, green, white and red, outlasted the Western Empire to be a public nuisance in Constantinople. And yet a people may have money to bet on racing who in their hearts care nothing more for horses than does the sporting cockney.

Rich youngsters might swank on horseback to impress the girls, but one does not read very much about a mounted aristocracy like our own, with gallant games like polo or manly pleasures such as modern hunting. At heart the Romans of the Empire were anything but horse-proud. In their military practice they never aspired to the glories of the old Greek Cavalry, or bred a horseman tactician to compare with grand old Xenophon.

Some fifty years before the Christian era, Livy described the heavy cavalry only as using bridles. This being interpreted means that the Roman dragoons were able for shock action, while their Hussars steered by the knees and fought in open disorder.

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On the whole it is difficult to ascribe to the Romans any advance in the art of horsemanship except in the matter of draught. The heavy engines which correspond to a modern siege train required not only draught beasts--oxen possibly, but also the paved causeway. The Roman road for horse traffic was as big an invention in its effect on civilization as the steam railway of our modern transport.

THE NORTHERN. Let us turn back to the Northern Ancestors of both Greeks and Romans. The Heimskringla shows the ancestral home of the Norse to have been in Russia. By the time they colonized Scandinavia, they were discarding the chariot, were fighting on horseback, and had waggons as well as sleighs. A Bronze age waggon at Copenhagen differs little in structure from those in use to-day. This waggon confirms the stories of gods heroes and kings riding and driving powerful horses at least as large the big Duns of modern Scandinavia. The theory of scrawny little ponies appears to the sheer nonsense. The evidence points indeed to a more general and more advanced practice of horse management than than either the Greek or the Roman.

THE GOTHIC HORSEMEN. While the Romans made no special advance in horsemanship the {122} fair Barbarians of Germany and Gaul evolved a notable idea. The gentleman rode to war attended by a couple of mounted serfs who had a remount for him if his charger fell, or even replaced his loss in the fighting line. In late times the Gothic gentleman became a knight, and his attendants were esquires in training until they won their spurs.

See then how the Latin word equus for a horse gives us equites as the rank of the ancient gentry of Europe, and Esquire the rank of our modern gentleman. The French word for horse: cheval gives us Chivalry and Chevalier. The Spanish word caballo gives us Cavalry, Caballero, and Cavalier. The horse has taught us more than ever we taught him.

THE PACK HORSE. While chariotry and cavalry were mainly engaged in killing civilization, the unobtrusive pack pony did almost as much as the ship in spreading culture along the channels of commerce. From the port of London for example a pack trail starting at Tower Hill ran westward along Newgate, Holborn, Oxford Street, and Bayswater Road, crossed the Thames at Oxenford, then branched to the gold mines of Dolgelly and the tin deposits of Cornwall. Along this artery flowed the Phoenician culture.

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A little later the merchants of North-western Europe in search of salt, landed at the Cinque Ports of Kent. Their pack trails converged to drop down Blackheath Hill. From thence the one trail coasted the southern edge of the saltings of Southwark by way of Old Kent Road and Bedlam, striking the first firm ground in the river bank at Lamb's Hythe (landing), where the Bishop of Canterbury afterwards built his town house. From Lambeth at low tide there was a ford to Horseferry Road on the Isle of Thorns in mid-river. From the island site of the City of Westminster, there was a broader but very shallow ford across the north arm of the Thames. One may see the north bank of the Island at Great George Street, Westminster; but the site of the pack trail is lost. It took up the ridge between the Tyburn and Bayswater brooks, avoiding the mudholes of both, along Park Lane. At Marble Arch it swung into the Bronze trail, to leave it presently at Tyburn Tree, and strike up Edgeware Road, and so via Watling Street to the salt wells in Cheshire. It was along the Bronze trail and the Salt trail that civilization found its way into England.

Were I a merchant I might see in wool the single origin of my country's wealth; were I a {124} broker I might see in stocks and shares the origin of prosperity. Each to his trade; but as an old packtrain captain I have ridden many a hundred miles, noting the grass-grown bridle paths along dry ridges, the hesitating down-hill curves of ancient roads as they approach wet ground, the outer hedging and the inner hedging as highways narrowed down when they were paved, and public house signs, such as the Packhorse, dating from the recent centuries when still the traffic of old England was done on cargo ponies. It needs but a little scouting to show clearly the story of some fifteen hundred years of England's progress down to the time when Cæsar's strength was taxed on joining battle with the British tribes. Our people, like the Gauls, had roads and chariots, armour of bronze and gold, old trades, and industries and towns before the Romans came.

II. THE DUN HORSE OF ASIA.

As the Earth reels through the Dark, and on her journey spins like a sleeping top, we only notice the changing of the seasons while she swings round her great orbit, and the swift passage of flying nights and days. It is only when one is quite alone in the far wilderness that one begins to feel the Earth in motion, and after sunset to watch her shadow climb the {125} eastern sky. To roll one's bed down beside the waning camp fire, to turn in and smoke the evening pipe, to lie looking up at the stars, is to know that one is only a speck of loose dust on a flying sphere, flung eastward at a thousand miles an hour, yet held down by the pull of the Earth's weight safe from being whirled away into space. Loose adventurers like me, loose air, dust, water, and loose tribes of men are all being flung with the surface, pulled by the centre of the Earth, and drifted about all the time without our knowing why.

Of course the weaker tribes have been flung eastward so far as there was land, and stay where they were thrown in China, Indo-China, Burma, and Bengal. Only the stronger races have thrust against the motion of the planet. These dark-haired sallow Asiatics, Scythian, Hun, Tartar and the rest were bred in regions of strong sunlight, filling their native steppes until they were overcrowded. They were harmless shepherds and herders who did a little hunting. But for the Dun pony we might not have heard much about them. When they tamed the pony the savages became barbarians, the little scattered tribes were welded into formidable hordes. And then they swarmed like locusts eating up the world under {126} some ruthless Caan, a Genghis, a Timour, burning all civilization, trampling out the embers of human reason. And in their wake came twilight--the Dark Ages.

History is a jade. She has a glad eye for soldiers and sportsmen whose business is destruction, but turns a sour face from lousy pilgrims to the shrines of Faith, poor craftsmen and scholars burdened with the tools of Progress, drab merchants who carry Culture in their packs, and all the messengers of civilization. Of these her annals are curt and negligent. She has plenty of gossip about Kings more or less human as advertised by scribes more or less venal; but keeps no chronicle of the pack trails on which the little Dun ponies carried all that made civilization to the camps of the barbarian and the savage. She told us nothing about the hundreds of opulent cities which now lie dead and buried in the Mongolian deserts. One does not like to speak ill of a lady, but her sense of truth is always moderate.

Adventure is not officially authorized as one of the Muses, but she is as truthful as History, and a deal more amusing as a guide.

History says that nations who had no horses used to be terrified at the first sight of horsemen, {127} and cites the instances of Peru and Mexico when Empires collapsed in superstitious fear. It seems quite natural then that the first mention of the horse in China should call him Dragon-Beast. He was not really formidable, being only a Dun pony carrying no doubt the good Mongolian pack apparel which consists of a saddle, and a detachable cargo rack, the oldest rigging known. His cargo was a lodestone, a rock of magnetic iron which served the Chinese Emperor as a compass. When the pony wanted to go west, and the magnet insisted on north his celestial majesty probably saw a jolly good bucking match.

From China to the Atlantic, and from the northern Taiga to the Indian ocean the old world was threaded all across with pack trails snaking from water to water over the deserts and pastures, the forests and the hills. Except in the very dry districts where camels, asses and mules were employed for transport, the Dun ponies did all the carrying over-land. From China to Europe was a three years' journey, not because of the distance but by reason of the robbers who made the trail unsafe. At each market town the packtrain captains waited, perhaps for months, until a caravan assembled sufficiently large to {128} undertake the journey. There were periods when great Tartar Caans controlled the whole of Asia north of the Himalaya, together with the grass land known now as European Russia. These monarchs from Zenghis to Kublai and later had post trails with post horses, and horses in relay for ambassadors and despatch riders bearing a golden tablet of office. Old Kublai for example was busy building Pekin when he sent the Polo brothers as envoys, riding post with the golden tablet, to visit the Pope in Rome and ask for a batch of priests to teach him the Christian faith. For years young Marco Polo, nephew of these merchants, rode post as envoy, visiting every realm in Asia. Very different were the ramblings on the pack trails of that rare scamp Fernão Mendes Pinto who in the sixteenth century worked as a slave on the Great Wall of China, travelled with marching armies, and as a fugitive tramp found his way by mysterious Lhassa, to the coasts of further India. Another colossal journey was that in the eighteenth century of Vitus Bering the Dane with his Russian trappers, and Stellar the German naturalist trekking on horseback to the sea of Okhotsk. There they built a ship, and sailed in search of the mysterious straits of Anian leading through {129} Meta Incognita to the Atlantic. They found America, but were wrecked at the tail end of the Aleutians. The surviving trappers built a ship and loaded her with sea-otter skins. These they sold in Pekin for wealth beyond dreams of avarice, and so returned riding as rich men home to their native Russia.

It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that English envoys and merchants found their way by water and the trail of the Dun pony from the White Sea to Persia and on even to Goa on the Indian Coast.

The trail of the Dun horse always led to adventure. Daring traders went to swap gems for silk at the Court of the great Mogul, or sold white ladies of the Caucasus to Haroun al Raschid down in Bagdad, or to Suliman the Magnificent at Stamboul, or offered purple shell-fish dyes of Tyre to tempt the young Prince Siddatha, or came from the East with gold and frankincense and myrrh and laid them at the feet of a Child in Bethlehem, or journeyed from Sweden with swords for the Prophet of Islam.

III. THE BAY HORSE OF AFRICA.

Apart from the sacredness of the Old Testament as dealing with the origin of a religion, we may, without offence to fellow Christians, {130} read this collection of Hebrew books as the secular history of an able but unholy people.

The collection of stories known as Genesis consisted mainly of heroic ballads, cast in the form of verse which can be easily and accurately remembered. These ballads were recited until at the time of the Babylonian Captivity in the fourth century B.C. the people learned to write and set down their annals in the form of manuscript. We may find the stories lacking in the salt of humour; we may doubt that singers and scribes were apt to improve on the original words, piling a deal of exaggeration on the naked facts; but at the very worst these legends of old Israel are terse, clear, consistent and gloriously true to human life and character. I had read the story of Jacob the Sneak, and Joseph the Prig, of gallant Esau, and gentle Ishmael in camps of live Red Indians, before I realised that Genesis is true to primitive life as a whole, and that, after forty centuries, the legend still glows and burns in its immortal truth, beauty, and power.

The story deals with wealthy Arabian stockmen. They and their neighbours bred she camels for milking, rode camels and asses, and used both for pack animals. They seem to {131} have valued oxen for heavy draught as well as for beef and hides, or they would scarcely have bothered to winter the cattle in stables. As any stockmen sees at a glance the sheep and goats were handled by experienced owners.

The stock would not have paid without a market, so, as these Arab sheiks had plenty of gold, we may presume that they dealt in wool, beef, hides, and draught animals with the fortified trading towns of the watered farming districts. No doubt they sold pack beasts also to the trading caravans.

There were no horses in the world as known to these folk. Abraham visited Egypt somewhere about the nineteenth century B.C. and found no horses there.

Beyond the skyline of the western desert from Egypt to the Atlantic ranged the Bay horse, the Barb of times to come. He was a delicate, swift creature, very brave and gentle. His arched neck bore a black and streaming mane, his tail was set high and carried clear of the rump. His eyes were set low, wide apart from which the dainty muzzle tapered, to sensitive nostrils and to lips like velvet. Legends of later times, and other countries made him son of the west wind, while custom gave each of his families a surname. They {132} have always been exempt from labour, attended by human servants, treated as a nobility. From very early times they were admitted to the private family life of the Libyan people, and driven with the four-spoke wooden chariot until both men and women learned to ride them.

In much the same spirit as our country folk go to town for shopping, it was the pleasant custom of these Libyans to raid Egypt. Between war and commerce the Egyptians brought Bay horses into their own use at some time later than the visit of Abraham, but prior to that of Joseph. This might be about the eighteenth century B.C. the era of Stonehenge.

Shortly afterwards horses and chariots began to appear in the painting and sculpture of Egyptian artists. Horses must still have been scarce when the Pharaoh gave to Joseph a signet and royal robes, but only lent him his second best chariot. It is true that the people already owned a few horses, for in the great famine Joseph accepted them in trade for grain.

It was in that generation that the dying Jacob, speaking from knowledge common among the civilized Egyptians, mentioned both ships and horses. He was frank enough to call {133} his son Dan "an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward." Here is the earliest mention of the ridden horse. It was in Jacob's funeral procession to his native stock range east of Jordan that there appeared "both chariot and horsemen, a great company."

One suspects a trace of swank in the story of that "great company." Jacob's countrymen were sheep herders, destined to go afoot for centuries to come. The Egyptians used chariots, but never took to riding as a habit. Merchants were trading horses to the Hittites, but that (until Ptolemy Philadelphus made water holes, and a highway in the second century B.C.) was done in face of extreme difficulty. The week's passage of the Desert of Sin could be made only in the first two months of each year, and even then the horses must be refreshed from water bags carried by camels. On the whole it is likely that the great company of chariots and horsemen was a poetic device for making the most of Joseph's posthumous importance.

According to Manetho, the well-known Egyptian historian, somewhere about the twenty-first century B.C. a most objectionable sheep-herding tribe of Arabs began to infest {134} lower Egypt. Manetho is prejudiced; but just as in modern Western America where the sheep herder is rated among cattle men as something rather lower than a dog, it is amusing to see how the poet in Genesis admits that shepherds were an abomination in the eyes of the Egyptians. If one dates Abraham's visit to Egypt in the twenty-first instead of the nineteenth century B.C. old Manetho and the Hebrew poet are perfectly agreed as to the Hyksos-Israelite invasion.

The Genesis narrative shows the insidious way in which the children of Israel drifted down into Egypt, then how they made themselves agreeable as office holders, and by introducing frogs, flies, lice, cattle sickness and other improvements until at last the Egyptians waxed desperate and ran them out of the country. Manetho says that these Hyksos people occupied lower Egypt east of the Nile from Memphis to the sea, and later on established a dynasty with six Kings in the succession. After five centuries the Egyptians combined under the Thebaid Kings of upper Egypt, and drove the Hyksos across the Desert of Sin into Palestine. It is quite possible that in Genesis, and Manetho's History we have the two sides of one story, and that it was the {135} possession of the Libyan chariot which made the Egyptians powerful enough to rid themselves of the artful but not very warlike children of Israel.

It is amusing to note the ways of the tribal poet in Israel who describes the murrain of cattle as killing off every horse in the length and breadth of Egypt, then out of spite kills them all over again by drowning in the Red Sea.

Setting the date of the Exodus at B.C. 1580, it would be about B.C. 1540 that the Israelites were afraid to attack the Canaanites who had good iron chariots. In the same way a nation armed with muzzle loading guns might hate to molest an army with quick-firing artillery. Forty years later, about B.C. 1500, horses began to appear in Mesopotamia, a bad lookout for Israel, destined some six centuries afterwards to be trampled under by Babylonian chariotry.

Some day we shall have a science of comparative chronology to guide us in our studies, and so be able to see how little improvements in horse-breeding, or the use of iron in building chariots, affected the rise and fall of nations. In the meantime some known facts of Red Indian history may help us to understand events in ancient Asia.

In primitive Red Indian life the tribes were {136} seated too far apart to get at each other for serious pitched battles. In lack of horse transport trade was limited to the waterways, and warfare to minor internecine pleasantries which kept young men in training. From the sixteenth century the pressure of white men driving in from the Atlantic began to affect these almost civilised people, forcing them to abandon their farms, fisheries and towns, reducing them to savagery and compelling them to trespass on occupied hunting grounds. All nations were set by the ears. Then they began to get ponies, and the rest was chaos.

So perhaps in Asia, the movements of tribes afoot may have been gradual overflows from crowded districts, and warfare a matter of cheery little forays to please the young. The possession of ponies gave a tremendous impetus to war and trade. From that time onward the tribes which were best mounted had a political future, and there was a slight handicap in favour of nations with Libyan Bays of fourteen hands two inches as compared with tribes using the Duns of Asia.

The Egyptians had horses in the eighteenth century B.C., the Israelites a few in 1580, the Hittites and Canaanites in 1540, the Assyrians not until 1500 B.C. Now Egypt, Canaan, {137} Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia had no native horses. The Egyptians got horses from the Sahara, the Asiatics mainly through Armenia. I cannot believe that the crossing of small Duns with small Bays in any region bred heavy horses for the needs of war.

A practical nation in the breeding trade would not rely for heavy stock upon the crossing of light strains. The way to get heavy stock is with strong food. Such oases of great deserts as Egypt and Mesopotamia had very little pasture, so long as their nations prospered. Every acre then was needed for strong grains. The well-mounted conquering nations were not those with splendid pasturage like Northern Africa or Southern Russia, but those which had no pasturage at all, who were compelled to feed horses on fodder more potent than any natural grass. The King's people might go without, but one may be perfectly certain that the King's horses lived on corn. What tribe or race of folk inherited Egypt or Mesopotamia mattered nothing, what strain of horses they owned mattered very little, but the people and the horses, for the time being in possession of irrigated oases walled about by deserts, raised the chariotry or the cavalry which ruled the surrounding world.

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Each nation passed through a phase when chariotry were the only mounted troops of tactical use in war. The importing of the largest and heaviest horses to be had, the feeding of these with grain, and cross-breeding of the Dun types with the Bay produced by slow degrees a remount for use by cavalry.

Earliest in the running were the Hebrews, for about 1000 B.C. King Solomon built stables for 40,000 chariots, and as many as 12,000 cavalry. As early as 700 B.C. Armenia, being in contact with the Asiatic and Russian horse stocks, became a large horse breeding establishment, supplying remounts southward to Asia Minor, where in B.C. 560 King Croesus of Lydia had good cavalry, to Syria and Palestine, to Assyria, and to Persia down to the fourth century. But in the meantime shipping had grown in the Mediterranean, and ships of sufficient burden to carry African Bays began to supply the Greeks. From the pony chariots of the fourteenth century B.C. a steadily improving stock marked the rise of Hellas. The Achaeans of 1000 B.C. had imported Bays. The Greeks of 400 B.C. had cavalry. Then came the breeding of fine horses in Macedonia, and, after the death of Philip in B.C. 336, the mounted troops of his {139} great son Alexander swept like a whirlwind across the Eastward deserts to where the monsoon rains made India populous. By this time cavalry had replaced the chariot. At the era of the Christ a chariot was still used when a victorious general entered a city in triumph. But the use of chariotry in war was limited to remote barbaric tribes such as the British.

The chariot for practical purposes was extinct before a single horse had found his way over the long dry marches leading out of the world to the remote oases of Arabia. Strabo the geographer, who at the era of our Lord made a survey of the known world, found that the horse had not yet entered Arabia. A land indeed where no water can be had except from wells was not a possible range for pastured horses, and the horse has not sufficient thirst endurance to be of much use for transport between the oases, whereas asses and camels were to be had much cheaper.

It was in the earliest Christian centuries that Arabian chiefs began to import Bay horses from Egypt. It seems likely that the beginning of their sea-trade enabled them to do so. While almost all nations of Europe and Asia were compelled by the need for heavy war horses to feed grain and to cross the imported {140} Bay with their native stock, the Arabs tried to preserve the purity of the desert breed. Even at this time eighty-five per cent. of high caste Arabian horses are Bays; and there is only one strain of any importance, the Hamdani so crossed with Russian Tarpans as to be white or grey. It must be remembered, however, that the demand of the Indian and European markets for greys and for heavy cross-breds has led the Arabs to breed extensively from their low caste strains. Moreover, the neighbouring regions of Syria and Mesopotamia sell cross-bred horses as "Arabian" regardless of colour, and of honesty. The Bay mares of the real Arabian aristocracy are never sold, and of the horses very few reach the market as compared with the numbers of low caste animals forming the ruck of the trade.

Down to the seventh century A.D. the Arabs were busy breeding from a very few imported Bays their meagre supply of horses. So far as the possession of horses went they would not have attracted much attention but for the coming to Arabia of steel weapons.

From prehistoric times the Swedes had been mining iron, and their trade routes led by river, to Novgorod, where lived a trading family the Romanovs, from whom descend {141} the Emperors of Russia. By river boat and by pack trail the Swedish iron found its way to many markets. Towards the seventh century the iron reached the Arabian oases to be forged into weapons of Islam. When the Arabian horsemen were armed and inspired by Mahomet they set out to conquer the world in the name of Allah. With the Moslem conquests eastward to Delhi, and westward through Spain to Poictiers, the Bay Horse passed into the commerce of mankind, adding to the endurance of the Asiatic Dun, and the strength of the European dappled horse that touch of gentleness and fire which quickens a dull animal into a living spirit.

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