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The Horse in Human History, by Pita Kelekna
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The horse is surely the "aristocrat" of animals domesticated by man. This book documents the origins of horse domestication on the Pontic-Caspian steppes some 6,000 years ago and the consequent migration of equestrian tribes across Eurasia to the borders of sedentary states. Horse-chariotry and cavalry in effect changed the nature of warfare in the civilizations of the Middle East, India, and China. But, beyond the battlefield, 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. Following Columbian contact, Old and New World cultures are contrastively evaluated in terms of presence or absence of the horse. And Spanish conquest of the horseless Americas is seen as the model for subsequent European equestrian colonization of horseless territories around the planet.
- Sales Rank: #994820 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Cambridge University Press
- Published on: 2009-04-13
- Released on: 2009-06-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.98" h x .94" w x 5.98" l, 1.55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 478 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Review
"..a general and approachable discussion of horses in human society the world over..."
BMCR
"... a fascinating study in which anthropology and history work well together."
Contemporary Review
About the Author
Pita Kelekna holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of New Mexico. Early fieldwork in indigenous societies of the Americas and later research conducted across the Middle East, Central and East Asia have well equipped her for this world-wide analysis of the importance of the horse in human society. She is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Anthropological Association.
Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
How Horses from the Steppes Transformed our World
By Anne Williams
This book is truly an eye-opener for someone who grew up learning that all cultural advances of ancient times originated in the Near East. But the recent opening-up of Russia and western access to the archaeology and history of the Eurasian steppes has dramatically changed this standard perception. The western reader now learns that the vast terra incognita of the steppes was in fact the central hub of early horsepower, metallurgy, rapid transport, trade, and, perhaps most significantly, military expansion that impacted and influenced ancient civilizations in the Mediterranean, Iran, India, and China.
Chapter 2 is a complex read in that it discusses the archaeological and linguistic materials evidencing original horse domestication on the steppes during the fourth millennium BCE. But it provides vital information for a full understanding of subsequent nomad invasions. In later chapters, the pivotal role of the horse is excitingly described in varied fields: economics, politics, the ritual observances of religious ceremonies, and the sporting contests of the hippodrome and the hunt. The final chapter delivers challenging and controversial conclusions regarding the consequences of equestrianism for the modern world: a fascinating read!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Comprehensive, sweeping and multidisciplinary look at our relationship with horses
By Ranger
I was looking for a book that was evidence based and, wow, did I get it! Pita Kelenka is a serious and scholarly author that has done exhaustive research in many different disciplines to write this book. She covers recent discoveries in archeology, metallurgy, paleontology, and history to add to our body of knowledge about ancient cultures and how they used horses in all aspects of their lives. Horses were everything from food to transportation to messengers of the gods to gods themselves. I had some hazy ideas about how and when horses were domesticated, but now I have a much broader and deeper understanding of the horse/human relationship that goes back at least 6,000 years. I also found some things I didn't expect to find in a book about horses, such as a thorough look at the origins of Islam and all of the competing sects that are still killing each other to this day over disagreements more that a thousand years old. I also found a look at Chinese history and how nomadic equestrians repeatedly invaded and conquered, yet failed to change the fundamentally agrarian nature of this culture. I learned about Zoroastrianism and Persian history, the Mongol invasions of eastern Europe, the middle east and China, and I came away with a profound appreciation of what horses have done for us as a species. Horses have facilitated the exchange of ideas and inventions that have shaped the broad course of human history. If you read this book, you will definitely see horses in a much different way. I highly recommend it and I think I will read it again, soon.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Compelling! (A bit too compelling, in fact.)
By Larry N. Stout
A (rather too) fast-moving and enthralling narrative, as the horse transports man through a flawless dressage by millennial leaps and bounds of history. The text is in fact as forceful (by dint of its outstanding dearth of equivocation) as an 8,000-horsepower locomotive, which cannot be derailed, or even sidetracked by the cautionary semaphores of circumspect modern historians. The author took the bit between her teeth (so to speak) and began with a nuclear thesis that the horse successively revolutionized human transport and then warfare, and was the vehicle that took Indo-European languages and culture from an Urheimat at the western borders of the Eurasian steppe to its farther adventitious and evolutionary manifestations in the four directions of the compass, reviving the centum-satem dichotomy in the process. The most-critical previous review rightly calls attention to the author's facile (and mostly tacit) ironing-out of wrinkles and patching-over of holes in the very thin and worn fabric of ancient history and prehistory in this largely unobstructed narrative; and the reviewer is correct in observing that selected parenthetical literature citations do not substitute for substantive argumentation. Kelekna essentially has cherry-picked published opinions, however distant from the scholarly center of gravity they might be, and deployed them as if they were proofs of what she wrote -- which they are not; I would be surprised, in fact, if the very authors she cites would not disagree with a variety of points in Kelekna's rather implausibly tight-knit synthesis. Nevertheless, her fundamental tenets relating to the consequences of horse domestication and use of the horse in transport and warfare are cogently argued, and the ritual significance of the horse in various apparently related ancient cosmologies and religions seems incontrovertible. So, taking the mean of 2 stars for liberties freely taken with historicity and 4 stars for stimulation and interest, I award 3 stars. If the axe had not been ground quite so feverishly and myopically, this might have been a very nice piece of scholarship -- but then, of course, we would have something much more voluminous, and less certain, with numerous tangents, and consequently soporific for the general reader. People, it seems, demand to know the "bottom line", even where none can be drawn by informed consensus. Here you can find it (a bottom line, not a consensus).
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