Episode 134 - All the Pretty Horses

This week, we've got one more past Patreon episode for you! Thank you all for your patience as we get back into the swing of things. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled new episodes in May. But for now, we're all horses, all the time. Amber gives you an unbridled (har!) look at the Hittite Horse Training Texts, which are much more than just Kikkuli (remember him?). After that, we veer from horsemanship to horse-man-’ship. First there’s a glimpse into the legal mind of the Hittites, and then some interesting commonalities across Indo-European societies and an overview of equine lives in antiquity. Ohhh neigh.

Notes:

• Kikkuli (International Museum of the Horse)

• Mitanni (Livius)

• These Asian hunter-gatherers may have been the first people to domesticate horses (Science)

• The Kikkuli Text. Hittite Training Instructions for Chariot Horses in the Second Half of the 2nd Millennium B.C. and Their Interdisciplinary Context

• Catalogue of Hittite Language (Konkordanz der heithitischen Keilschrifttafeln)

• Hittite Laws (Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor)

• Hittites, Horses, and Corpses (The Early Nature of the Bible)

• The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations

• Ancient origins of horsemanship (Equine Veterinary Journal)

• Horse Gear from Hasanlu (Expedition)

Image: The equine bronze known as the Medici-Riccardi horse head in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Florence is likely a surviving part of a Hellenistic life-size equestrian sculptural group, which has been dated around the second half of the fourth century BCE. The sculpture entered the antiquarian collections of the Medici in the fifteenth century and was cited for the first time in 1495 as part of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s antiquarian collection, although it had certainly been found well before that.

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