PERIOD 1. 



TO THE ^ALL OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE. 



CHAPTER I, 



Earliest Cavalry. 



SECTION I. — SCYTHIAN AND ASSYRIAN CAVALRY. 



It is impi ssible to fix the period at wln(^h cavalry, in 

 the proper sense of the word, were first used. They 

 were not known in Greece at the time of the Trojan 

 War, or when Homer wrote, or some evidences of it 

 would have appeared in his writings. There is no satis- 

 factory record of such a force in the Bible until after the 

 time of David, but when Herodotus wrote they were 

 generally in use in Asia, and had been in use for a long 

 time.^ It is generally supposed that horsemen fighting 

 as cavalry and riding on horseback came into use about 

 120 years after the Trojan War, but this is merely an 

 approximate conjectur(\'" 



It is very probable, although there is no historical 

 evidence of it, that the Scythians were the first people 

 to use the horse to ride upon. Living a nomadic life, 

 upon great plains, in a country where horses existed in 

 great numbers, where the climate and soil were favour- 

 able to their increase and maintenance, and subsisting as 

 the Scythians did principally upon their flocks and herds, 

 they would naturally at a very early period discover the 

 use of the horse for equestrian purposes. Once the 



' Herodotus, i. 79. 



2 Bardin, 1097. 



