The chariot for practical purposes was extinct before a single horse had found his way over the long dry marches leading out of the world to the remote oases of Arabia. Strabo the geographer, who at the era of our Lord made a survey of the known world, found that the horse had not yet entered Arabia. A land indeed where no water can be had except from wells was not a possible range for pastured horses, and the horse has not sufficient thirst endurance to be of much use for transport between the oases, whereas asses and camels were to be had much cheaper.
The Arab horse
It was in the earliest Christian centuries that Arabian chiefs began to import Bay horses from Egypt. It seems likely that the beginning of their sea-trade enabled them to do so. While almost all nations of Europe and Asia were compelled by the need for heavy war horses to feed grain and to cross the imported Bay with their native stock, the Arabs tried to preserve the purity of the desert breed. Even at this time eighty-five per cent. of high caste Arabian horses are Bays; and there is only one strain of any importance, the Hamdani so crossed with Russian Tarpans as to be white or grey. It must be remembered, however, that the demand of the Indian and European markets for greys and for heavy cross-breds has led the Arabs to breed extensively from their low caste strains. Moreover, the neighbouring regions of Syria and Mesopotamia sell cross-bred horses as "Arabian" regardless of colour, and of honesty. The Bay mares of the real Arabian aristocracy are never sold, and of the horses very few reach the market as compared with the numbers of low caste animals forming the ruck of the trade.
Down to the seventh century A.D. the Arabs were busy breeding from a very few imported Bays their meagre supply of horses. So far as the possession of horses went they would not have attracted much attention but for the coming to Arabia of steel weapons.
A result of Islam
From prehistoric times the Swedes had been mining iron, and their trade routes led by river, to Novgorod, where lived a trading family the Romanovs, from whom descend the Emperors of Russia. By river boat and by pack trail the Swedish iron found its way to many markets. Towards the seventh century the iron reached the Arabian oases to be forged into weapons of Islam. When the Arabian horsemen were armed and inspired by Mahomet they set out to conquer the world in the name of Allah. With the Moslem conquests eastward to Delhi, and westward through Spain to Poictiers, the Bay Horse passed into the commerce of mankind, adding to the endurance of the Asiatic Dun, and the strength of the European dappled horse that touch of gentleness and fire which quickens a dull animal into a living spirit.
CHAPTER VI.
HORSEMANSHIP.
I. THE STRAIGHT LEG.