The oldest structured saddle ever discovered comes from the East
In 2015, a partially looted tomb was found in a quarry in Mongolia, where however there were still wooden finds that could be reassembled into a saddle. Now radiocarbon dating carried out by the team dates the artefact back to around the 4th century AD, making it one of the earliest known frame saddles in the world. The road to a new method of riding that would change the way we travel and fight on horseback.
“This was a pivotal moment in the technological history of people and horses,” said Taylor, corresponding author of the new study and curator of archeology at the CU Museum of Natural History.
He and his colleagues, including scientists from 10 countries, published their findings on December 12 in the journal Antiquity .
The research reveals the little-appreciated role of the ancient Mongols in spreading horse riding technology and culture around the world. These advances ushered in a new and sometimes brutal era of mounted warfare, coinciding with the fall of the Roman Empire.
The discovery also highlights the deep relationships between humans and animals in Mongolia. For millennia, pastoral peoples have traveled across the vast grasslands of the Mongolian steppe with their horses, which, in the region, tend to be short but sturdy, capable of surviving winter temperatures that can drop well below freezing. Airag, a slightly alcoholic drink made from fermented horse milk, remains a popular drink in Mongolia. The ancient Mongols were then part of a sort of ancient confederation of steppe peoples with relationships that reached all the way to the Scythians who lived in what is now southern Russia.
The shape of this saddle is already very modern and marks the beginning of medieval and therefore modern cavalry, with the stirrups, different and more advanced than the ancient one, where one rode practically bareback.
Horse fighting
The saddle was made of about six pieces of birch wood held together with wooden nails. It has traces of red paint with black trim and includes two leather straps that probably once supported the stirrups. (Researchers also reported a recently discovered iron stirrup around the same time in eastern Mongolia.) This makes it, as we were saying, an extremely modern form of saddle.
The group was unable to definitively trace the provenance of these materials. Birch trees, however, commonly grow in the Mongolian Altai, which suggests that the locals made the saddle themselves and did not trade it.
The presence of the stirrups, which were obviously accompanied by padding that no longer existed, allowed something new for the ancient world: charging on horseback with a lance.
Until now it was believed that saddles with stirrups were an invention of the 5th – 6th century AD and came from China. Now this discovery comes to anticipate the use of the saddled horse by at least a century, and gives the credit to the Mongols, who made the Horse, seven centuries later, what tanks are for our times. The proto-modern saddle passed, with modifications, westward, first to the Arabs, then to Europe, where, modified, it was the basis of medieval and modern heavy cavalry.
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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-piu-antica-sella-con-struttura-mai-scoperta-viene-dallest/ on Sun, 24 Dec 2023 14:51:10 +0000.