214 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



realised the immense importance of horses to his people, as is 

 plain from various passages in the Koran. He declares that the 

 Almighty created horses from a condensation of the south-west 

 wind and he represents God as thus apostrophising that animal: 

 " Thou shalt be for man a source of happiness and wealth ; thy 

 back shall be a seat of honour, and thy belly of riches ; every 

 grain of barley given to thee shall purchase indulgence for the 

 sinner!" Elsewhere he propounds the comfortable doctrine 

 that the money which one spends on horses in the eyes of God 

 is alms that one makes at one's own cost. "Every grain of 

 barley given to a horse is entered by God in the Register 

 of Good Works." Readers of history well know that it was 

 to their cavalry that the first caliphs owed largely their 

 astonishing conquests. 



Let us now return to the horses of Persia, Media, and 

 Assyria. It is clear from our investigations into the history 



N)f the Arab horse that the Nisaean breed the best horses 

 in Asia in the centuries before the Christian era did not come 

 from Arabia. But though the potentates of Asia could not 

 import horses from Arabia, there was another region from which 

 by at least 900 B.C. they habitually procured horses at a great 

 price. In the Book of Kings we read how " Solomon had 

 horses brought out of Egypt and linen yarn : the king's mer- 

 chants received the linen yarn at a price. And a chariot came 

 up and went out of Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and 

 a horse for an hundred and fifty : and so for all the kings of 

 the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did he bring them out 

 by their means 1 ." The Hittites are supposed to have pushed 



x down to northern Palestine by 1400 B.C., as is inferred from 

 letters written by the petty kings of Palestine to their Egyptian 

 overlords, Amenophis III and Amenophis IV, preserved in the 

 Tel-el-Amarna tablets 2 . According to Prof. Jensen, the Hittites 

 were Indo-Europeans, and their script was invented by the fore- 

 fathers of the modern Armenians. They may therefore have 

 passed down from that region, from which, as we have seen, 

 horses were being sent to Palestine in the seventh century B.C. 



1 1 Kings x. 26-28. 



2 Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands, p. 620. 



