216 PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC HORSES [CH. Ill 



Jensen has identified a colt's head symbol found on several 

 so-called Hittite inscriptions as Mut(d)allu, the name of several 

 kings mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions. I here reproduce 

 (Fig. 67) a bas-relief found near Malatya (the ancient Melitene) 

 in 1894. It is assigned to the eighth century B.C. 1 and repre- 

 sents a lion-hunt, but the conventional drawing of the horse 

 does not enable us to judge of the effect produced on Hittite 

 horses by the blood stock imported through Solomon. Professor 

 Owen was the first to point out that the horse does not appear 

 at all early on Egyptian monuments, and his acute observation 

 has been amply verified by later inquiry. It is now certain that 

 the horse and the chariot appear for the first time only on 

 the monuments of the eighteenth dynasty. The first mention 

 of a chariot occurs in the reign of Aahmes I, a king of the 

 seventeenth dynasty and the expeller of the Hyksos. This king 

 cannot have begun to reign earlier than B.C. 1587 2 , and possibly 

 his reign falls considerably later. The pictograph for the 

 chariot shows a wheel with four spokes. The testimony of the 

 Egyptian monuments is quite in accord with that of the Book 

 of Genesis, which represents the Egyptian monarch as bestowing 

 every sort of domestic animal except horses upon Abraham, 

 who according to the traditional chronology flourished in the 

 eighteenth century B.C. 



It has long since been suggested that the Egyptians owed 

 the horse to their Hyksos conquerors, but this has never been 

 proved, though it seems certain that the horse was introduced 

 during the dark period between the Middle and the New Empire. 

 The best authorities are agreed that the terms for horse which 

 became ssmt and smsm in Egyptian, and which also appear in 

 Canaanite and Aramaic, are loan words, but whence borrowed 

 no one yet knows 3 . The two words for wheel carriages merkobt 

 (cf. Sem. merkab), and the agolt (cf. Sem. agala) were likewise 



1 Hilprecht, op. cit., p. 779, with the figure, for permission to copy which I 

 am indebted to the great kindness and courtesy of Messrs A. J. Holman and Co., 

 the well-known American publishers. 



2 Prof. Flinders Petrie dates his reign as B.C. 1587-62 (Hist, of Egypt, 

 Vol. n. p. 29). 



3 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, p. 517. 



