enlightened horsemanship through touch

A controversial giant statue of a white horse by sculptor Max Wallinger will soon be erected at the Ebbsfleet station in southern England, the UK’s new gateway to continental Europe for Eurostar high-speed trains. Pita Kelekna tells us why this symbol is especially appropriate….

Well, it's big alright!

Pita Kelekna has uploaded another segment of her book, The Horse In Human History to This Side of the Pond. Entitled, The White Horse at Ebbsfleet, this chapter describes equine images and their role in history. In a previous post, I wrote about the White Horse of Ebbsfleet and the controversy it has engendered. Kelekna views this enormous sculpture from a historical perspective.

From among those perspective, she writes,

In 620, the Prophet Muhammad mounted the winged white horse Buraq* on his miraculous Night Journey through the seven levels of heaven to speak with Allah, Moses, and Jesus, thus linking Islam with the two older religions. In medieval England, Saint George battled the dread dragon on a magnificent white steed. And in Mongol equestrian culture, Khubilai khan celebrated each spring a Great Feast in which herds of pure white stallions and mares, all revered as sacred, had free run of the summer palace park at Xanadu. Later in the summer, the khagan performed the ritual horse sacrifice and the scattering of white mare’s milk to the winds as a symbol of Mongol ascendancy over the vast steppes.
*American President Barach (sic) Obama’s first name refers to this white horse.

I find that fascinating.

At Ebbsfleet station, Max Wallinger’s White Horse stands poised to embark on a new era of high-speed locomotive travel. Its presence reminds us the locomotive was first known as the “Iron Horse.” As international passengers catch a fleeting glimpse of this giant statue, they will know the White Horse embodies man’s ambition for ever more rapid and complex travel.

The White Horse of Uffington, courtesy BBC.com

© 2009 enlightened horsemanship through touch and Kim Cox Carneal

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Pita Kelekna has uploaded another segment of her book, The Horse In Human History to This Side of the Pond. Entitled, Efficient Equine Transport, this entry explores the history of the use of horses in transportation and how it affected the course of human history in the New and Old Worlds.

In the Far East, the Chinese achieved two significant breakthroughs during the first millennium BC, inventing first the trace harness (breast strap) and then the even more efficient contoured collar harness. While Roman chariots of minimal size, carrying two persons at most, were often drawn by four horses, contemporary Han vehicles with heavy roofs, frequently carrying six passengers, were usually drawn by a single horse.

Edited to add: I have n idea how that crazy image of my name got there, and I can’t get rid of it. Patience is appreciated.

Pita Kelekna has uploaded another segment of her book, The Horse In Human History to This Side of the Pond. Entitled, Rebel Horsemen of the Americas, this chapter reveals how the Spanish conquistadors’ imposing warhorses assisted with the northward progress of New Spain from land of the Aztecs and Incas to the canyons and mesas of the Southwest. Using horses, steel swords, firearms, and (indirectly) disease, Cortes and Pizzarro managed to overthrow New World civilizations in a matter of months after first plundering their immense wealth.

As the frontiers of New Spain moved north, the horse was reintroduced into the very canyons and mesas of the Southwest where Equus had initially evolved four million years earlier. During the 1680-90 Pueblo revolt, hundreds of Spanish horses escaped from the upper Rio Grande valley into their natal environment, where they prospered and multiplied to form the great mustang herds that forever changed the history of the American West. Further South, during the seventeenth century, a new equestrian adventurer emerged, the gaucho.

© 2009 enlightened horsemanship through touch and Kim Cox Carneal

If you like what you have been reading, please subscribe to the RSS Feed, and visit Bloggers Choice Awards to vote for Enlightened Horsemanship Through Touch.

Pita Kelekna has uploaded another segment of her book, The Horse In Human History to This Side of the Pond. Entitled, The Spanish Reconquista, the chapter she encapsulates in this post covers the failed attempt by Muslims to invade Iberia in the eighth century. Central to the success of the Christian rebuff of that invasion was the equestrian prowess of the Christian knight. Nowhere were horse-riding skills more proudly displayed than in the chivalric bullfight, whose early history Kelekna discusses.

Conflicts between Moors and Christian Spaniards saw the rise of a unique kind of knightly equestrianism, displayed in the pageant of the bullfight. Their horses were the finest in Europe – part Arabian, part North African Barb, part Iberian stock, all of which combined courage and intelligence with dramatic beauty.

© 2009 enlightened horsemanship through touch and Kim Cox Carneal

If you like what you have been reading, please subscribe to the RSS Feed, and visit Bloggers Choice Awards to vote for Enlightened Horsemanship Through Touch.

Pita Kelekna has uploaded another segment of her book, The Horse In Human History to This Side of the Pond. Entitled, The Horse in Mongol War, Hunt, and Peace, Kelekna chronicles the exploits of both Ghenghis and Kubilai Khan (along with his less terrifying brother Hulegu) and the ways in which horses helped to make them household names today.

Genghis Khan, from National Palace Museum in Taipei

The Mongols lived off the horse; as they traveled, they milked and slaughtered for food. Their empire would bridge a continent, and their methods sped technological innovation into the modern era.

Let me know if you ordered a copy of this book and have read it. I have not yet received my copy. Is it as good as it looks?

© 2009 enlightened horsemanship through touch

If you like what you have been reading, please subscribe to the RSS Feed, and visit Bloggers Choice Awards to vote for Enlightened Horsemanship Through Touch.

Pita Kelekna over at This Side of the Pond, the American Blog of the Cambridge University Press, has written about one of the most interesting equestrian sports, Buzkashi.

In case you have been sleeping under a rock somewhere, Buzkashi is a traditional Central Asian (think Afghanistan) team sport played on horseback, which is more or less translated as, “grab the goat.” I don’t understand why Central Asians don’t use balls like polo players, or how the use of a dead goat, emptied of entrails, soaked in cold water for 24 hours to toughen the hide, enhances the sport, but there you have it. It probably has to do with the fact that the goat is a former sentient being. In any case at least the Central Asians are more honest about their “balls” than Americans. It’s closer to its original form (and less “doctored” for emotional deniability than, say, a football, whose pigskin cover has been conveniently removed many steps from the original animal. Nonetheless, some of us know what a football is. Lest any “morally superior” Westerners look down their noses at those “primitive” Afghans, remember: you play ball with the stuffed skin of a pig. You are not that different!

Buzkashi Game

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZpuOn86PYI&hl=en&fs=1]

© 2009 enlightened horsemanship through touch

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The fifth installment in Pita Kelekna’s Cambridge University Press This Side of the Pond blog series on the subject of her upcoming book, The Horse In Human History has been posted!

Among the topics covered in this post are: the Arabian Horse and its superiority over the dromedary for “commanding the strategic overland trade routes between the Indian ocean and the Mediterranean;” the spread of Islam across Asia; paper manufacture, wootz steel; and the concept of zero.

These inventions ushered in the great age of Islamic learning. Employing Arabic as the universal language of communication, philosophers and scientists from the borders of China to the Atlantic pursued knowledge in diverse disciplines and engaged in an exchange of ideas unprecedented in earlier civilizations. Everywhere there was high mobility and efficient communication. Horse-sped, scientific knowledge diffused rapidly over large segments of the educated elites, across different regions of the Islamic world and beyond – as Jewish, and Christian scholars translated Arabic works into Latin.

As readers know, I’ve been following author Pita Kelekna’s posts on Cambridge University Press’ blog, This Side Of The Pond for a a couple of months. Her latest blog entry, Invasions, Civilizations, and Transcontinental Communication, is the fourth in a series promoting her new book, The Horse In Human History.

Kelekna describes how “horse-borne incursions from the steppes invaded sedentary (agricultural) civilizations, and how horses figuratively shrank the world.” I wonder what those horse-borne marauders would have thought of the internet and its world-shrinking powers. Maybe Bill Gates is the ultimate Ghenghis Khan.

In this post, Kelekna follows the Indo-Aryans from 1900 BCE to the sixth century AD Mongol Avars and the invention of the metal stirrup. Her most interesting assertion is that, with the horse-drawn chariot carrying Buddhism north to China, the religion, by way of the horse, became a vehicle for increased communication.

Horse power had effectively transformed the vast inhospitable wastelands of the Eurasian steppes into an intercontinental corridor of rapid communication.

Timeline of the spread of the use of the horse-drawn chariot

Author Pita Kelekna has added a third post to her blog about her upcoming book, The Horse In Human History.

Traditionally, history focuses upon centralized sedentary civilizations, such as those of Mesopotamia, tending to dismiss nomads as mere barbarians beyond state borders. But how did these intrepid pastoralists successfully traverse the vast hostile expanse of the Eurasian steppes?

The Mobile Culture of the Steppe Nomad details how these migrations were facilitated by the horse.

Scythian gold plaque

… of tantamount importance were the portable dwellings that enabled mobile herders to survive the climatic extremes of the continental interior. From the Yamnaya horizon, we know that the very first mobile habitation was the covered wagon with hooped canopy. But from later funerary models and pictographs, it seems that a primitive tent was early placed atop the wagon. The initial simple wooden frame, covered by matting or weatherproof felts, probably was easily lifted from the wheels to provide a stable dwelling in camp, while allowing for quick return to mobility as needed. At first conical, then dome-shaped, as the architecture became more sophisticated, the structure was made collapsible for transport by pack animals. Dating from the first millennium BC, even today thousands of trellis tents, known as ger or yurt, continue to dot the steppes. Their collapsible bentwood structure covered by felts allows nomadic horsemen to penetrate the most rugged terrains and to lead their herds to the remotest pastures.

Cylinder seal, First Millennium, BCE, showing a steppe rider shooting to the rear in the famed Parthian Shot form

Visit This Side Of The Pond, the American blog of Cambridge University Press for more fascinating posts from CUP authors, including Pita Kelekna.

Pita Kelekna has a new post in her blog about The Horse in Human History on the Przewalski Horse.

Not one of us can imagine a world without horses. Yet before the advent of the domesticated horse, the world was quite a different place. According to anthropologist Pita Kelekna, the horse is the most aristocratic of the animals domesticated by man.

In her soon-to-be-published book, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge University Press), Kelekna documents the origins of equine domestication and the ways in which horses have affected the development of human civilzation.

horsepower also afforded great advances in transport, agriculture, industry, and science. Rapidity of horse communications forged far-flung equestrian empires, where language, law, weights, measures, and writing systems were standardized and revolutionary technologies and ideas were disseminated across continents. Always recognizing this dual character of horsepower – both destructive and constructive – the politico-military and economic importance of the horse is discussed in the rise of Hittite, Achaemenid, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Arab, Mongol, and Turkic states.

Kelekna contrasts the ways in which Old and New World cultures are evaluated in terms of presence or absence of the horse, explaining how Spanish conquest of the horseless Americas is the model for subsequent European equestrian colonization of horseless territories around the planet.¹

I am privileged to offer a preview of the contents of this marvelously erudite book, tailor-made for inquisitive equestrian minds. The world as we know it would not exist without horses. The Horse in Human History will provide a longitudinal view of how horses were domesticated, how the modern world to came be, and just why Horses Are Us.

The Phylogeny of Equines

In the coming weeks, Kelekna will be blogging on this topic at Cambridge Blog History In fact, two of her blog posts are already up.

I am also proud to offer a question and answer session with the author later in the month of March. If you’re interested (and who wouldn’t be?), read the blog, think up your questions, and join us for Q and A. You can post your questions for Pita Kelekna here at Enlightened Horsemanship Through Touch. They will be answered and the entire Q an A session will be published by RSS from Cambridge University Press.

¹ Adapted from This Side of the Pond.