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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 1264467" data-attributes="member: 5328">There aren't, and this was part of the evidence that lead to the belief, current for many years, that the riding of horses was not invented until after the invention of the chariot. But this belief has been overturned of late years.1. It turns out that the onagers and other smallish equids whose bones, found in the Middle East, have returned very early dates were herded for food, not as draught animals.2. Horse jaws have been found (at Dereivka in the Ukraine) with wear on the teeth that is consistent with their champing on bits, and not with any other hypothesis anyone has come up with. These have been dated to at least six thousand years old, easily antedating the Iliad and Odyssey. Bits are useful only when the horses are ridden.Finally, don't forget that Homer's works are not primary evidence: he was writing about supposed events at least three or four hundred years before his time, and although he does display some astonishing accuracies (for example in the siting of cities that were long gone in his time), he is not describing his own time. It is possible that in his day people rode, but that the old stories he worked with went on about chariots (an archaism in his time). Thinking that 'people rode chariots in the old days' he wrote chariots everywhere, even though his heroes in fact my have ridden outside of battle.</blockquote>