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SpaceShipRat t1_jbe02q8 wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Humans Started Riding Horses 5,000 Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests by Magister_Xehanort

Wild guesswork isn't the best way to figure out things, especially when contradicting someone giving actual sources and facts.

Training animals to pull things came before horse riding, as humans already had experience attaching oxen and donkeys to ploughs and carts. Then they had the idea of standing on a tiny cart pulled by a horse, and only a long time afterwards did folks get the idea to sit on the actual horse. It might seem obvious to us, but it was absurd in ancient times, so much that legends of centaurs sprang up in greece when they heard of barbarians "riding" around.

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StekenDeluxe t1_jbe98y3 wrote

Precisely. Very well-put.

If folks were riding horses all through the Bronze Age, one suspects that this would have left at least some trace in the written record.

But no.

Not a single text from that era describes horse-riding as something “normal,” at home or abroad, among the rich or among the poor. It’s always wild, crazy, dangerous, comical, irresponsible or absurd.

I’ll add one more example.

In the fifth book of the Odyssey, at one point Odysseus survives a shipwreck by straddling a plank of wood. As he is helplessly thrown hither and thither by the waves, he is compared to a man on horseback. Now think about that. The image only makes sense if, to Homer and his contemporaries, a rider on horseback was in no way, shape or form in control of the situation. The animal, much like the raging ocean, was seen as a wild, headstrong, violent thing, heeding no command and obeying no orders. Think rodeo, not cavalry. That stuff came later.

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SpaceShipRat t1_jbfssqc wrote

what comes to mind is the minoan bull rodeos, where they'd do just that, hop over a bull, do handstands, it's not a strange idea that someone would try the same kind of rodeo with horses.

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