X 
THE HORSE. 
HISTORY. 
and from the same documents we learn that the ancestors of the Israelites were not possessed of horses when they dwelt in the 
plains of Syria. When Abraham sent his servant from Palestine to Mesopotamia to bring a wife for his son Isaac, the man 
announces himself to Laban, the brother of Rebecca, thus : “ I am Abraham’s servant, and the Lord hath blessed my master 
greatly, and he is become great; and he hath given him flocks and herds, and silver and gold, and men-servants and maid¬ 
servants, and camels and asses.” No mention is made of the Horse, nor, in the subsequent enumeration of the treasures of Isaac, 
is the Horse once spoken of. And when Jacob returned from Mesopotamia to the land of his kindred, he had oxen and sheep, 
and goats and asses, and camels, but no horses. In a later age, the descendants of Jacob multiplied in a district of Egypt lying 
between the Nile and the Red Sea, whence their great legislator conducted them to the country which they were to render their 
own. During their long abode of several centuries in the land of Egypt, they retained the habits of their ancestors in what re¬ 
garded the Horse. In the law which they were required to obey, reference is made to the Ass, in order to denounce its flesh as 
unclean, to condemn the sin of coveting it when it belonged to a neighbour, and to command that it should be suffered to rest 
from its labours on the Sabbath-day; but no allusion is made to the Horse as a part of the goods of the people. Nay, it is an 
injunction to them that they shall not possess themselves of this animal in the land to which they were journeying. This rocky 
and limited territory was then, as it is now, ill suited to the rearing of the Horse, and never could be so well defended by cavalry 
as by infantry; and it is a historical fact that the Jews were never so successful in war as when they trusted to the latter arm, as 
in the earlier period of their history, and at a subsequent age, during the glorious struggle of the Maccabees. Moses, with a 
prescient knowledge of the nature of the country which was to be subdued, discourages the cultivation of an instrument of war 
which other nations valued so highly. He counsels the people, when they go to battle, to have no fear of the horses and chariots 
of their enemies; but to put their trust in the God of Israel, who had brought them from the land of Egypt. He directs the 
future ruler of the country not to multiply horses in the land, and so literally was the order obeyed that it became the practice to 
hough the horses which were made prize of in the field. King David, on one occasion in which he took 700 horses and 1000 
chariots, hamstrung them all except 100 of the chariot horses which he reserved. He speaks with a proud disdain of horses as an 
instrument of war, and represents them only as employed by the enemies of his country. But the restraints of the custom and 
the laws were soon broken through, and Solomon formed a numerous body of cavalry and chariots. He even established a regular 
trade in horses with Africa, and supplied the neighbouring country with those of Egypt. Further, it is remarkable that when 
the Jews entered Palestine from the south, they encountered no horses; for no mention is made of cavalry during the first cam¬ 
paign of Joshua. The Philistines alone possessed horses in the south of Syria, and they seem to have been an Egyptian colony. 
Nay, it appears that Arabia and all the countries stretching from Palestine to the Persian Gulf were at that time destitute of 
horses. When the Midianites, an Arabian nation, were subdued, the spoil consisted of sheep, of oxen, and human captives, but 
no horses are mentioned. When, in the reign of Saul, a war was carried on with certain Arabian nations on the Persian Gulf, 
the spoil consisted of slaves, of camels, of sheep, and asses; and in an attack on Judea by the Midianites, in a subsequent age, 
they came, we are told, u with their cattle and their tents; and they came as locusts for multitudeand no mention is made of 
horses. But although the Jews, on their first entrance into Palestine from the south, encountered no horses, yet, no sooner did 
they come into contact with the nations to the north, than they were met by warlike enemies possessed of horses and chariots. 
But these nations approached the countries on the Black Sea and the Caspian, the great region of the Asiatic Horse, whence, 
doubtless, they derived their horses, and not from Africa, with which they could have no intercourse, nor from Arabia, which had 
no horses. If, then, we are to place reliance upon the only historical records of the time, we must come to the conclusion that 
Syria, and thence to the countries of the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, were not countries of the subjugated horse at a period 
posterior to the historical era. These countries manifestly derived the horses which peopled them in a subsequent age, not from 
the south, but from the great Officina Equorum on the north. It was from their contiguity to this region of the Horse that the 
empires of Assyria and Medea so early became nations of conquerors and horsemen. And we may believe that the people of 
Northern Syria derived the horses with which they encountered Joshua and the Jewish infantry from the same source. From 
other documents we learn that Asia Minor, from the earliest times, was a country of horses; and these, we must believe, were 
derived from the north, and not from the south. The conclusion, further, which we may draw from these historical notices, 
sacred and profane, is, that the Egyptians derived their horses from the vast continent which they inhabited, and not from a 
region from which they were separated by a tract of country in which the Horse did not exist in the first ages. We may rather 
believe that this remarkable people derived the horses which they so early possessed from regions in which horses existed from 
the earliest times, and which we have as much reason to regard as indigenous to Africa, as those which people the plains of 
Tartary are to Asia. 
The African horses are distinguished from the Asiatic by their longer limbs, by their smaller girth at the loins, and by the 
