ABSTRACT
When riders discovered, with the help of the bronze bit, how to assert themselves as masters of their mounts, they could finally sit forward, on saddles or cloths positioned just behind the withers. By the beginning of the ninth century BC good horsemanship was certainly in evidence in the lands just to the east and north of Assyria. Whether men in the eastern zone of the Eurasian steppe were competent riders as early as 1000 BC depends upon the dating of the Cherchen mummies. We may assume, however, that in parts of the steppe good riding had begun to appear by the ninth century, and that by the seventh a rider culture was well established as far to the east as Arzhan, at the headwaters of the Yenisei river. In the heartland of the Near East-the lands south of the Tauros mountains and west of the Zagros mountains-men were somewhat slower to learn the techniques of good riding, perhaps because here the chariot still served well enough for rapid transport. In Greece good riding seems to have begun toward the middle of the seventh century, and in temperate Europe perhaps soon after that.
