142 HISTORY OF THE HORSE. 



In the most ancient hieroglyphs we find him 

 present, and always so represented as to show 

 that, even in the remote antiquity from which 

 they date, he had been brought into complete 

 and serviceable subjection. In the oldest Egyp- 

 tian paintings the horse is seen only in the war 

 chariot, and in the descriptions of the siege of 

 Troy only the charioteer appears, from which it 

 has been supposed that the first horses used by 

 the Greeks were too small to be conveniently 

 ridden. But in the lately-discovered paintings 

 in the palace of Nimrod, at Nineveh, disinterred 

 by Layard, and supposed to be more than three 

 thousand years old, horsemen are exhibited both 

 in the chase and war. 



But further back than even those distant times, 

 in the ages where authentic history merges into 

 the shadowy light, amidst which myth and fable 

 mingle with the real, we find this noble animal 

 figuring, but then exalted into a semi-human 

 sphere. The Centaurs, who inhabited the passes 

 of Mts. Pelion and Ossa, and the great plains of 

 Thessaly, in Upper Greece, were probably a 



