Page 92 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

To the north, then, the battle-ax people were free, to roam at
will with their herds of small dark cattle and with their thickset
muscular horses. The horses were their pride, and were regarded

with a worshipful awe, the reason for which was long forgotten.
For it was already many generations since the notion of cattle­
keeping had permeated by word of mouth through the moun­
tains.

The ancestors of the nomads had lived by the chase, hunt­
ing on foot with their dogs the antelope and wild cattle and wild

horses of the plains. It was in the deep south, in the fabulous
valley of the Two Rivers far beyond the mountains, that the
keeping of cattle and sheep in captivity had begun, long before

the memory of man. When the idea was brought, not very many
centuries ago, to the hunters of the grasslands, it was seized on
avidly. Cattle were rounded up in large numbers, but not only

cattle. The horse, too, a beast unknown in Mesopotamia, was
domesticated, at first solely for the sake of its meat and milk.
But then wanderers from the south brought in a new no­

tion. They told how, in the southern lands, domestic animals,
oxen and asses, were used to draw wheeled carts and sledges.
And the new herdsmen tried out the idea. Oxen proved tracta­

ble, and could pull fairly heavy wagons at a walking pace. But
the horse was a different matter. It took time and complicated
ritual to break in a horse, and even then it could only draw the

lightest carts. But it could draw them fast. Two horses, harnessed
to a chariot capable of bearing two men, could travel at speeds

never before achieved in the history of man, far faster certainly
than a man could run.
No wonder, then, that the horse is worshipped as the servant

of the gods. Clearly, the sun-god himself, the chief of all the gods,
who can traverse the heavens from horizon to horizon in a single

day, must be drawn on his path by horses.
With the invention of the horse-drawn chariot the fetters of
distance are loosened, and the herdsmen are given the freedom
of the steppes. The result is an explosion. Cattle herding had al­

ready caused a phenomenal increase in the human population,
an increase which strained the resources of the original home

pastures. Some two hundred years before our story opens, even