Le cheval et le pouvoir. Comment l’hippologie et le commerce de deux races au Bronze Récent ont pu changer le cours de l’histoire à l’Âge du Fer

D. MICHAUX-COLOMBOT, « Le cheval et le pouvoir. Comment l’hippologie et le commerce de deux races au Bronze Récent ont pu changer le cours de l’histoire à l’Âge du Fer », Res Antiquae 12, Bruxelles, 2015.

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A general outline on the social phenomenon that linked men and horses from the fourth to the first millenniums B.C. onwards is given in this paper. The symbiosis was a driving force that operated social revolutions. Domestication was a first economic one that entailed a succession of others from tribal raiding on horseback to organized chariotry in the Bronze Age that brought about diplomatic internationalization. Then in the Iron Age a further step opened the period of organized cavalry that changed the political scene from allied states to the widely dominating Neo-Assyrian Empire. The quest for a superior and taller breed that had developed along the Nile Valley, later known as Dongola breed would have triggered the Assyrian campaigns to Egypt. The horsemanship of the little known population from Meluḫḫa voiced in cuneiform literature and that of the Medjay in the Egyptian sources is put in parallel to posit that they were the same people living on the eastern skirts of the Egyptian Delta, and that they were instrumental in horse procurement systems. As military and messengers they channeled horses from Mitannia to Egypt in the middle second millennium, and after between Hatti and Egypt. Then they cooperated with the Neo-Assyria in the first millennium, when they campaigned in Egypt, with the goal to control western trade, among which the much desired large specie of Egyptian-Kushite horses.

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