ABSTRACT
In the late fifth, fourth and third millennia the inhabitants of the PonticCaspian steppe occasionally carved figurines of horses or of horse-heads, and incised or painted figures of horses on pots or stelae. The steppe dwellers also engraved, carved or painted a few figures of men. But excavations of steppe settlements and graves of the period 40002000 BC have not yet produced a figure of a man on a horse. The earliest of what are called “horse-head sceptres” date from before 4000 BC, but as noted in the preceding chapter the heads are not certainly those of horses.1 More certain are fourth-millennium figurines, carved from boars’ tusks, which clearly depict a short, stocky horse with a short mane.2 On a third-millennium beaker found in a burial at Tudorovo, a Late Tripolye site, the potter or his assistant painted a row of line-figure animals, and the length of the neck and the tail suggests that the animals were meant to be horses.3 The prize representation of a horse found on the steppe in a third-millennium context appears on a silver vase deposited in the great burial at Maikop, just north of the Caucasus (see Figure 3.1). The Maikop horse, like the others that were painted, etched or sculpted on the steppe before 2000 BC, wears no elements of harness or control. Evidently a few steppe artists found horses worthy of depiction, but no more so than cattle or wild animals, and from the very limited artistic evidence that has been found one would not suspect that during the fourth and third millennia anyone on the steppe had ever seen a horse being ridden or driven.
