{"id":421,"date":"2008-11-03T09:05:28","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T13:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thegreathorse.com\/blog\/?p=421"},"modified":"2016-10-23T13:02:32","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T17:02:32","slug":"the-long-colorful-road-of-horsemanship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/2008\/11\/the-long-colorful-road-of-horsemanship\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Colorful Road of Horsemanship"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Legend of the Great Horse <\/a><\/em><\/strong> traces horsemanship from its earliest beginnings. The premise of the story is that Meagan, a horse-interested teenager of modern day, is whisked back in time to relive history \u2026 on horseback. As she travels in \u201cjumps\u201d from the earliest days of man\u2019s association with horses, Meagan and the reader experience the changes in horsemanship that mirrored the advance of civilization.<\/p>\n

A hallmark of skilled modern riding is that it looks \u201ceasy,\u201d but it has not always been this way. The casual spectator watching well-groomed horses cantering a jumping field or half-passing down the centerline may be forgiven believing things such as \u201cthe horse is doing all the work\u201d or \u201canyone could do it\u201d etc. Riding looks easy when done well because the rider remains in balance with the horse, maintaining a fluid rhythm with the mount\u2019s athletic motion. This is not how horsemanship has looked through most of history, and nothing we now take for granted about riding was obvious or simple for humans to discover.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"The<\/a><\/dt>\n
The “Greek Seat”<\/span><\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/h5>\n

The origins of horseback riding are lost in the mists of time, but using the horse to pull wagons, carts and chariots represented the first phase of practical horsemanship. Mounted horsemanship does not appear in clear view until antiquity, and after at least 3000 years of development it wasn\u2019t terribly impressive. The horses were guided with nose-rings by a rider who sat far back toward the horse\u2019s hindquarters, though the Greeks modified this by inching forward to sit on the middle of the horse’s back. It literally took the human race thousands of years to discover where, exactly, to properly sit on horseback.<\/p>\n

To humans, horses possess an alien mind, and what seems obvious today was not \u201cobvious\u201d at all. As one example, stirrups were not invented until after the fall of the Roman Empire\u2014which itself was more than 25,000 years from the days that prehistoric man\u2019s preoccupation with the animal was shown by painting in caves. First came a \u201ctoe loop\u201d which developed in India (c. 500BC) for the holding of the rider\u2019s big toe. A few centuries later nomadic \u201cSarmatians\u201d of southern Russia and the Balkans invented a single stirrup for use in mounting. Over the next half-millennium, Asia brought the stirrup to fruition; it was copied by Europeans and revolutionized war.<\/p>\n

One might consider that our ancestors were not the most clever ponies in the stable, but the reason for the long period of development was that advanced horsemanship required changes in mankind\u2019s thinking. As humanity grew sufficient empathy to discover advanced horsemanship, the modern world also began a rapid transformation into the modern age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Legend of the Great Horse traces horsemanship from its earliest beginnings. The premise of the story is that Meagan, a horse-interested teenager of modern day, is whisked back in time to relive history \u2026 on horseback. As she travels in \u201cjumps\u201d from the earliest days of man\u2019s association with horses, Meagan and the reader … Continue reading “The Long, Colorful Road of Horsemanship”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[88,154],"tags":[118,28,44,30,119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14718,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions\/14718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegreathorse.com\/book-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}