The stirrup and early tack.

The oldest writing on training horses

For a long time Xenophon's work was treated as the oldest surviving writing on horsemanship. According to Wikipedia, that changed in 1931, when Bedrich Hrozny published the Kikkuli text, a guide to conditioning chariot horses from the Hittite world, attributed to Kikkuli of Mitanni and dated about 1360 BCE.

Xenophon's "On Horsemanship" itself is dated slightly differently in two Wikipedia articles: about 355 BCE in one and about 350 BCE in the other. Wikipedia also notes that Xenophon twice mentions an earlier treatise by Simon of Athens, which is now lost apart from fragments published by Ruehl in 1912.

The oldest surviving saddles

Which saddle is the oldest is itself disputed, because the candidates are dated by different methods.

• Yanghai, Turfan Basin, Xinjiang. HeritageDaily reported on 28 May 2023 that a soft leather saddle found in a woman's burial at Yanghai had been radiocarbon dated to between 727 and 396 BCE, and published as the earliest directly dated riding saddle. It was made of two cowhide cushions stuffed with deer and camel hair, with a seat and front supports formed from five pieces of hide sewn with sinew.
• Tuekta barrow 1, Pazyryk culture. Summaries of the study by Wertmann and colleagues (Archaeological Research in Asia, 2023) say they compared Yanghai with the saddle from this barrow, dated about 430 to 420 BCE and long treated as the oldest, and called Yanghai contemporary or possibly older, though simpler than the Scythian saddles of the 5th to 3rd centuries BCE. We did not read the paper itself, so this comparison is unconfirmed.

A search summary of Britannica's saddle entry says the leather saddle developed between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, made the horse far more useful, especially in war, and probably came from the steppes. Britannica refused our request, so we could not confirm the wording.

Where the stirrup came from

The stirrup's origin is one of the longest-running arguments in the history of riding. The versions in our research:

• The Asian steppes, about the 2nd century BCE. This is how a search summary of Britannica's stirrup entry puts it. We could not open the page.
• India, late 2nd century BCE or earlier. Wikipedia says the earliest foot support was a loop for the big toe used in India, possibly as early as 500 BCE, but Wikipedia itself marks the claim as needing a citation.
• A Kushan seal, about 150 CE. Wikipedia describes a carnelian seal in the British Museum showing a Kushan deity using an early platform-type stirrup.
• China, 302 to 415 CE. According to Wikipedia, citing the historians Dien (1986) and Graff (2002), a Western Jin funerary figure near Changsha dated 302 CE shows a single short stirrup, judged to be a mounting aid rather than one used while riding. A Jin tomb figure near Nanjing of about 322 CE is the earliest reliable picture of a pair of full-length riding stirrups. The earliest surviving pair comes from the tomb of Feng Sufu, a Northern Yan noble, at Beipiao in Liaoning, dated 415 CE: mulberry wood covered with bronze and iron plates.
• Mongolia, 3rd to 5th century CE. Wikipedia, citing a 2024 paper by Bayarsaikhan and colleagues in Antiquity, reports a single iron stirrup from a cave burial at Khukh Nuur with radiocarbon dates of 243 to 405 CE, and a saddle strap from Urd Ulaan Uneet, dated 267 to 535 CE, that suggests paired stirrups. This raises the question of whether China or Central Asia came first.
• The saddle as the key. A summary of a 2023 paper by Yunhe Li in Chinese Archaeology says it rejects both the leather toe-loop and toe-stirrup theories and argues that the solid-tread saddle of the Wei and Jin periods was what led to the stirrup. We saw only the summary.

The stirrup reaches Europe

Wikipedia says stirrups reached Europe by the late 6th or early 7th century, mostly through Central Asian peoples such as the Avars. The Strategikon, a military manual traditionally attributed to the Byzantine Emperor Maurice and dated to between 575 and 628 (a date some scholars dispute), calls for two iron steps on saddles.

Wider use in western Europe came in the 8th century, Wikipedia says. It cites the historian Bernard Bachrach's observation that only 13 of 704 eighth-century male burials in Germany excavated before 1967 contained stirrups, and dates the earliest Scandinavian stirrup of the type known as type I to the 8th century, from grave III at Vendel in Sweden.

The Great Stirrup Controversy

The stirrup also became the centre of a famous argument among historians. We saw most of the sources for it only as search summaries, so the details below are unconfirmed.

Lynn White Jr. argued in "Medieval Technology and Social Change" that the stirrup made mounted shock combat possible and so gave rise to feudalism in western Europe, building on a thesis Heinrich Brunner had put forward in 1887 about Frankish cavalry. The book's date is given two ways: 1962 by Medievalists.net, while Wikipedia's stirrup article cites a 1964 edition. Medievalists.net's summary says Peter Sawyer's early review accused White of technological determinism, that Donald Bullough and Bernard Bachrach (1970) challenged his evidence point by point, and that a 2002 summary by Paul Gans concluded the stirrup did not cause feudalism.

The horseshoe

The history of the nailed horseshoe is the least settled part of this page. Every version in our research came from a search summary or a page we could not open, so all of them are unconfirmed:

• Britannica's horsemanship entry is summarised as saying Eurasian peoples used various hoof coverings about the 2nd century BCE, but that the nailed iron shoe first appeared in Europe about the 5th century CE.
• Wikipedia describes the Roman hipposandal as a strap-on hoof boot with an iron sole, not a nailed shoe.
• An American Farriers Journal blog cites W. N. Bates (1902) on four bronze shoes with nail holes from an Etruscan tomb of about 400 BCE.
• Other summaries place the earliest securely dated nailed shoe in the 5th-century burial of the Frankish king Childeric I at Tournai, and give 910 CE as the earliest clear written mention of iron shoes and nails.

The equipment of the modern sport, and the rules that govern it, are covered in the Equipment section. The next chapter of this history is the classical riding schools.