3 ms·

Kikkuli, 1345 BCE: Training the Chariot Horse

29 points by benbreen 4y ago

motohagiography 4y ago
I'd only read Xenophon's (430 BC) horsemanship as the earliest record, I did not know about this Kikkuli reference. There is a reference in Xenophon to someone called Simeon, but apparently the records were lost. His Cavalry General has some related insights about horsemanship. Not to Cliff Claven this, but this Kikkuli program is a complete program for making a ridable horse using gradual and persistant regular change over a relatively long period of time in dozens of steps. If you followed this with a young horse today, you would have a perfectly good hack. There are a lot of gaps in horsemanship literature, partially I think because the methods made and broke empires, so they may have been just as guarded as a secret as cryptography. The next earliest I could find after Xenophon was Dom Duarte, a King in Portugal writing about horsemanship in about 1245 AD. so our current records have a gap of almost 2k years without writing on horses, which seems unlikely to have happened. Duarte's treatise is closer to the training of the horseman as a philosopher who depends on the willing and loyal alliance of another animal to both survive and prevail. After him, the writings we have now are all in rennaisance Italy, whose methods were imported to France to provide an education their king, and then with some letters and monographs by French masters after them. Then, after about 1850, Germany's cavalry methods are what seems to have survived. Today, there is still a divide between German and Latin schools of riding. The point is, this Kikkuli text is a nice missing piece because we know if we had horses, we were writing about them, and where there are hundreds of years of gaps in the literature about them means we have some fantastically large gaps in history as well. Up until very recently, their story was our story.
- epilys 4y ago
  Indeed it's a great missing link, it's incredible we have this text survive at all. Surviving ancient texts are filled with references to other texts and we don't know most of them. To know what was written by Xenophon or Cicero or Lucretius is a happy result of everyone through centuries of labour who copied, preserved and protected these works. An Italian scholar in the 15th century, Bracciolini [0], was responsible for "rediscovering" and preserving many works after hunting for them in old libraries and monastic scriptoria simply by knowing about them through references. I'd love to learn about other such cases in non European history. [0] perhaps most famously De rerum natura by Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini

29 points by benbreen 4y ago

I'd only read Xenophon's (430 BC) horsemanship as the earliest record, I did not know about this Kikkuli reference. There is a reference in Xenophon to someone called Simeon, but apparently the records were lost. His Cavalry General has some related insights about horsemanship. Not to Cliff Claven this, but this Kikkuli program is a complete program for making a ridable horse using gradual and persistant regular change over a relatively long period of time in dozens of steps. If you followed this with a young horse today, you would have a perfectly good hack. There are a lot of gaps in horsemanship literature, partially I think because the methods made and broke empires, so they may have been just as guarded as a secret as cryptography. The next earliest I could find after Xenophon was Dom Duarte, a King in Portugal writing about horsemanship in about 1245 AD. so our current records have a gap of almost 2k years without writing on horses, which seems unlikely to have happened. Duarte's treatise is closer to the training of the horseman as a philosopher who depends on the willing and loyal alliance of another animal to both survive and prevail. After him, the writings we have now are all in rennaisance Italy, whose methods were imported to France to provide an education their king, and then with some letters and monographs by French masters after them. Then, after about 1850, Germany's cavalry methods are what seems to have survived. Today, there is still a divide between German and Latin schools of riding. The point is, this Kikkuli text is a nice missing piece because we know if we had horses, we were writing about them, and where there are hundreds of years of gaps in the literature about them means we have some fantastically large gaps in history as well. Up until very recently, their story was our story.

epilys 4y ago
Indeed it's a great missing link, it's incredible we have this text survive at all. Surviving ancient texts are filled with references to other texts and we don't know most of them. To know what was written by Xenophon or Cicero or Lucretius is a happy result of everyone through centuries of labour who copied, preserved and protected these works. An Italian scholar in the 15th century, Bracciolini [0], was responsible for "rediscovering" and preserving many works after hunting for them in old libraries and monastic scriptoria simply by knowing about them through references. I'd love to learn about other such cases in non European history. [0] perhaps most famously De rerum natura by Lucretius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini