PREHISTORIC AND EARLY HORSES 7 



these may have been Central Asia, from which 

 last-named region the animal also passed into 

 Europe, if the horse were not indigenous to some 

 of the countries in which history finds it. We 

 learn that Sargon I. (3800 B.C.) rode in his char- 

 iot more than two thousand years before there is 

 an exhibition of the horse in the Egyptian sculp- 

 tures or proof of its existence in Syria, and his 

 kingdom of Akkad bordered upon Persia, giving 

 a strong presumption that the desert horse came 

 from the last-named region through Babylonian 

 hands. It seems after an examination of the rep- 

 resentations on the monuments, that the Eastern 

 horse has changed but little during thousands of 

 years. Taking a copy of one of the sculptures of 

 the palace of Ashur-bani-pal, supposed to have 

 been executed about the middle of the seventh 

 century before our era, and assuming that the 

 bareheaded men were 5 feet 8 inches in height, I 

 found that the horses would stand about 14 

 hands very near the normal size of the desert 

 horse of our day. The horses of ancient Greece 

 must have been starvelings from some Northern 

 clime, for the animals on the Parthenon frieze 



