There is always some night in the origins; also, of the Arabian horse, the poets made a son of the wind. According to a story that goes back to Ali, the fourth caliph, the Prophet spoke thus:
"When God wanted to create the horse, He said to the south wind," I am going to create of your substance a new being who will become the glory of my chosen ones, the shame of my enemies, the adornment of my servants. "" Create, Lord said the wind, create this being. "And God took a handful of wind and created a horse to which he said:" I created you Arab, with the hair of your forehead I tied the success, I put on your back the wealth of the spoils, I have deposited treasures in your flanks, I establish for you king of domestic quadrupeds, I will fill with love for you the heart of your master ... "»
Let's go back down to earth. The Arabian horse, whose exact genealogy remains controversial, goes up in one way or another to the Central Asian horse with a straight chamfer, fine tissues, delicate gaits, and a well-separated tail, which was conventionally given the name of Aryan (equus caballus aryanus) because it accompanied the so-called Aryan (or Indo-European) peoples in many of their migrations. The tarpan, studied more than a century ago by the German Gmelin (equus caballus gmelini), could represent its primitive form.
It differs from another horse from Central Asia, said Mongolian or Mongolian (Equus caballus mongolicus), sometimes in Roman nose, abundant hair, the tail carried close to the body, whose cradle Dzungaria, door southern Siberia, northwestern China. Przewalski's horse (equus przewalskii), discovered in 1879 in western Mongolia, has been seen for a long time as a primitive and wild form of the Mongolian horse. We know today that it is not so, the Przewalski having sixty-six chromosomes, instead of sixty-four for the equus caballus, the true horse; it is therefore different species.
Aryan and Mongol horses were modest in size and hardly exceeded one meter forty. Living both in the harsh conditions of the steppe, they had acquired the same qualities of endurance and hardiness; but the Aryan apparently enjoyed a better nervous impulse, giving him more speed and vivacity.
This Central Asia, that their bands furrowed in all directions for tens of thousands of years, in prehistoric times, was it the original cradle of the horse species? Nothing is less sure. In America alone, we have been able to find the complete line of fossils that lead to the equus caballus. The eohippus, ancestor of all the equines, but whose size did not exceed that of the fox, appeared there sixty million years ago. And one of his descendants, who became a horse, is supposed to have passed from Alaska to the Asiatic continent through the Behring Strait, then caught in the ice.
What happened then? Fossil records are too rare to be established with certainty, and perhaps will never be known. What is certain is that throughout prehistory, at the rate of climate change, the advance and retreat of glaciers, groups of horses, isolated from each other, began to evolve separately. Thus two secondary cradles of the horse race were slowly drawn up: Dzungaria and, in Turkestan, the region of Ferghana.
Let's go back down to earth. The Arabian horse, whose exact genealogy remains controversial, goes up in one way or another to the Central Asian horse with a straight chamfer, fine tissues, delicate gaits, and a well-separated tail, which was conventionally given the name of Aryan (equus caballus aryanus) because it accompanied the so-called Aryan (or Indo-European) peoples in many of their migrations. The tarpan, studied more than a century ago by the German Gmelin (equus caballus gmelini), could represent its primitive form.
FROM CENTRAL ASIA TO THE MIDDLE EAST
The first, as we have said, was that of the Mongolian type. From prehistoric times, this Mongolian horse began to swarm in three main directions: in the east, where he reached China; in the south-east, where he reached the Iranian plateau and the bar of the Zagros mountains (it was he who used the Sumerians, founders, in low Mesopotamia, of the first writing civilization); finally, to Europe, where her flocks split again into two lineages. One, through the forests, the lakes, the marshes left by the melting ice, reached Scandinavia. She is at the origin of Nordic horses called cold blood. The other progressed to Spain; it was here that the Paleolithic hunters figured on the walls of their caves - in Lascaux, in Périgord, as in Altamira, near Santander, or in the region of Malaga. It will come out the type of horse called Iberian, or Andalusian. Later, along the same routes of invasion, it is the Mongol pony still, particularly resistant, which will allow the columns of Attila, then of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, to sweep towards the east and the south. The second line, on the contrary, that of the Aryan horse, did not descend from the highlands of Asia until the historical period. From this initial trunk emerged several varieties - traditionally called "races" - from the horses used by the various families of Indo-Europeans, during their successive surges. The most venerable is undoubtedly the Egyptian race. The plain of the Nile was not, originally, a country of horses. She ignored them until the Hyksos invaders, Asians of Aryan origin, introduced them into the delta, hitched to their chariots, around the year 1700 BC. Bas-reliefs, vases, papyrus, a painted box depicting the life of All Ankh Amon, in the fourteenth century before Christ, give a good idea of what they were. Small in size, they had a stretch, a straight chamfer, a tail in panache, and a lively look. Used for hunting or war, coupled with light tanks with spoked wheels, they were mounted only exceptionally. It is they who, according to the Bible, pursued the people of Israel at the time of Exodus, were swallowed by the waves of the Red Sea.
Excellent trainers, good breeders, the Egyptians will make these little horses a more developed race, giving it a sacred character; on a sandstone bas-relief of the Ptolemaic period, we see the falcon god Horus, on horseback, pierce with his spear a crocodile. Already, under the shock of Phoenician, Greek and Roman companies, the great brewing of peoples began on the shores of the Mediterranean. Behind the man, the Egyptian horse continues on his way. In the south, on the high Nile, it meets the race of Dongola, of Mongolian affinity. To the west, it will forge in Cyrenaica the Barce race, famous among the Greeks. Then, continuing still, he will be, at least partially, at the origin of the beard race of North Africa; We will come back later. Meanwhile, other waves of Indo-Europeans continue to descend from Central Asia to the plains of the Middle East. The first occupants of Lower Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, as we have said, had Mongolian horses.
The Assyrians, on the other hand, were going to dispose of Aryan horses from Ferghana and more recently introduced between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Remarkable trainers too, they would not be satisfied, like the Egyptians, to harness them; they would mount them with art, and the absence of saddle would not prevent them from using bows and spears. Figures from the Sargon period (8th century BC) depicting tributaries leading to similar horses and bas-reliefs from the palace of Assurbanipal in Nineveh, a century later, give excellent images: slender, they have a living physiognomy, a straight chamfer, a stretched back, fine fabrics. Chinese authors have described the Ferghana horses as having skin-deep blood. The expression must be taken literally: a parasite, parafilaria multipapillosa, fixed under the skin, makes the blood bead when, during the summer, the animal sweats.
This family, which may be called Assyrian for convenience, was to receive, over the years, the contributions of horses from Syria, the Caucasus, Khorassan, whose type was not fundamentally different from his own, and which were brought by conquerors successive. The Persians, in the first place; Cyrus imported from the Caucasus excellent black-skinned white horses, and Xerxes brought from Khorasan the strong Nevis horses he loved, as opposed to the Greek horses.
These bring us to the third great pre-Christian wave of Aryan horses: the one that, still coming from Turkestan, passed no further south, but north of the Caspian, left the Caucasus road and, skirting the north Black Sea, debouched in the Balkans.
Of this group, a family interests us particularly, because it will find itself too, in spite of this long detour, in the Middle East, rise - in the 4th century before our era - by the soldiers of Alexander the Great. These Macedonian horses came from Thessaly, where the myth of the Centaurs and Lapiths was born. It was from Thessaly that one day Philip, king of Macedonia, was brought to the famous Bucephalus, which his son Alexander alone knew how to tame. The cavalry of the conqueror did not fail to leave traces in Asia Minor and in Syria, where she met, among others, an old breeding going back to the Hittites (other Indo-European invaders) that came reinvigorate the Greek contribution. It is significant that the Thessalian horses sometimes have the chamfer slightly hollowed, which prefigures that of the Arabs.
A Crucible: The Fertile Crescent
In all likelihood, in fact, it is in the Fertile Crescent that we must look for the cradle, or rather the crucible where his race began, from multiple inputs.
Because of the many invasions that had, in turn, covered, Mesopotamia had, as we have seen, an important horse reserve. In the Hellenistic period, breeding was very active at both ends of the Crescent: around Antioch, in Syria, and Seleucia, in Mesopotamia, the two capitals of the successors of Alexander. After that, the region fell to the power of the Parthians, a Scythian people of horsemen and archers at the legendary address, then Romans, finally - provisionally - Sassanid Persians.
At no time did the horse production stop. And it was in this reserve that the Bedouins of Arabia, until then camel drivers, were going to draw when they decided to procure horses.
On the Aryan type horses that were raised in Mesopotamia at the beginning of our era and were likely to tempt this new clientele of Arabs, a bronze coin of Abgar VIII, King of Edessa (late 2nd century), we informs perfectly. One sees there the king riding a welded horse, with a beautiful neck, a right chamfer, a rump rather horizontal, a tail tied up. How, when, why did the Arabs adopt this type of mount? That's what we need to see now.
But it is first of all necessary to say what words of this Arab people, whose name appears for the first time in an edict of the king of Assyria Salmanassar (858-834 BC). Ethnic and Semitic culture, it was not homogeneous and included various groups that nevertheless cemented a certain community of manners. The two most important were the Ishmaelites, from Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar, and the Kahtanids. from Kahtan (the Yecten of the Bible), reputed son of Heber, the eponymous author of the Hebrews and ancestor of Abraham.
The first, nomads, evolved in Arabia, in Transjordan. in Syria. The latter reached the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula. the happy Arabia of Ptolemy, where the family of the Himyarites destroyed the first kingdom of Sheba. in Yemen, before founding a second. Both, camel drivers, did not yet have horses, as noted by the ancient historians.
When Xerxes, reports Herodotus, attacked Greece in 480 BC, his army included Arabs, but they mounted camels; and his enumeration of the products of Arabia makes no mention of the horse. Similarly, Titus Livius, recounting the battle of Magnesia, where Antiochus the Great, King of Syria, was defeated by Scipio (189 BC), mentions in the vanquished troops only camel Arabs.
Even more explicit, a century and a half later, Strabo relates the expedition that his friend Aelius Gallus, prefect of Egypt, led in the year 25 BC. AD in southern Arabia. Fortified with ten thousand men and disembarked in the Hejaz, the column failed Marib. And the famous geographer describes the center of Arabia as an arid country inhabited only by pastors and camel herders. The southern part of the country, he adds, feeds a great number of animals, among which are neither the horse nor the mule. In the north-west of the peninsula only, the Nabatheans of Arabia Petrae raise some horses.
P.S: This is a free excerpt from Philippe Barbié de Préaudeau's book "Le cheval arabe des origins à nos jours", published by Jaguar 1987, this is neither an adaptation nor a reproduction.
