Enlivening the bones: The Mongolian horse before its sacrifice

Abstract

The roots of Mongolia's horse culture are usually located in the Late Bronze Age and associated with the appearance of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles from regions to the west. The earliest evidence in Mongolia for both horse and vehicle is not material but rather pictorial: it is detailed in hundreds of images pecked into the boulders and bedrock of the Altai Mountains. The second indication of an emerging horse culture is offered by ritual horse-head burials associated with Late Bronze Age khirgisuur, as well as with the related deer stones. Within that same period appears the earliest material evidence of the equestrianism that became the Mongolian engine of conquest over the following millennia. In all three cases, the horses in question were domesticated, Equus caballus, rather than one of the Asian wild horses, Equus przewalski and Equus ovodovi. From that has followed the assumption that Mongolia's horse culture is predicated upon the appearance of the domesticated horse in the Late Bronze Age.

This paper interrogates these assumptions regarding the roots of equine significance within Mongolian prehistory. Using the pictorial documentation available in Altai Mountain rock art, it locates the roots of Mongolia's horse culture in a much earlier period and associated not with E. caballus but rather with the wild Przewalski's horse.