218 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



foreign words, perhaps Semitic, as Erman holds, but possibly 

 borrowed by the Semites also. The word katana, charioteer, is 

 foreign. It is thus certain that the Egyptians borrowed the horse 

 and the chariot from some neighbouring people. The horses are 

 represented as spirited animals pawing the ground with im- 

 patience, and carry their tails just like the well-bred Arab of 

 to-day (Fig. 68). The royal stud was an establishment of great 

 importance, and the office of First Charioteer (katana) to his 

 Majesty was held even by princes. The king's favourite horses 

 "the first great team of His Majesty" bore fine-sounding 

 names (strongly contrasting with the simple nomenclature of 

 the horses of the Homeric Acheans), such as " Amon bestows 

 strength," and "Amon entrusts him with victory," the latter 

 being termed in addition, "Anat (the war-goddess) is content." 

 The horses are usually painted brown on the monuments, though 

 in a few instances however we meet with a team of white 

 horses, as for instance in a tomb at 'Ein-nud'em. The occasional 

 occurrence of light-coloured horses on Egyptian monuments is 

 a clear indication that some of the horses employed in Egypt 

 were derived though we know not when from western and 

 upper Asia. We have some evidence which points to Mesopo- 

 tamia as the probable source, for an Egyptian inscription 

 mentions the importation of horses from Sangar 1 , which is 

 identified with the modern Sindjar, the mountainous region 

 between the Euphrates and Tigris, in which, as we have seen 

 above (pp. 183-4), light-coloured horses, in spite of the constant 

 infusion of bay Arab blood, are still practically universal. 



There are no representations of Egyptians on horseback, 

 and with the exception of a few very doubtful allusions in 

 documents there is no evidence that they ventured to mount 

 the horse at all until a very late period 2 . 



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



2 Erman, Aegypten (Eng. trans.), p. 493. A. v. Kremer holds that the 

 Hebrew and Aramaic names of the horse (sus) point to their being loan-words 

 from Indo-Germanic (Skt. d$vas, Zend aspa, etc.), and that Arabic faras (Hebr. 

 pdras) points to the Persian, though F. Hommel places the horse amongst the 

 animals domesticated by the original Semites (Schrader, Preh. Antiquities of the 

 Aryan Peoples, p. 43, Engl. trans.). 



