• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

2,700-Year-Old Saddle Found In Ancient Chinese Tomb Is Oldest Ever Discovered

May 25, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Archaeologists working in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China have discovered what may well be the oldest known saddle for horse riding – and we’re betting its ancient owner isn’t who you’re expecting.

Made from cow leather and filled with a mix of straw and hair from deer and camels, the saddle was made between 727 and 396 BCE, according to radiocarbon dating – making it at least as old as the previous record-breaking saddles, and potentially much older.

Advertisement

Despite its age, though, it’s in surprisingly good condition, thanks to the arid heat of the northwestern Chinese desert where it was discovered. And what’s more, the researchers note, it’s clearly very well constructed – showing “practical and well-thought-out design, the fine execution of crafting techniques, in particular the leather- and needlework,” that betrays its creation by “skillful craftsmen familiar with leatherwork, horse husbandry, and riding.”

Oldest saddle stitches

Some of the saddle’s intricate stitching has survived.

Image credit: Wertmann et al., 2023, Archaeological Research in Asia (CC BY 4.0)

And perhaps even more remarkable – at least given how we often think about ancient cavalry and riding – is the rider: “Unlike […] younger finds from the elite Scythian burials, this early saddle was made from inexpensive materials and used by a common woman,” the researchers write.

Dressed in a hide coat, wool pants, and leather boots, the rider was buried with her saddle “placed on her buttocks as if she was seated on it,” the team note. And it clearly isn’t just for show: the saddle shows “[o]bvious traces of repair,” they write, showing that it was “intensively used and maintained” throughout its lifetime.

“This really shifts our ideas about who was riding horses,” University of Zurich biomolecular archaeologist Shevan Wilkin, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. And yet our ancient cavalry woman was not alone: a number of other graves excavated at the site, including some mixed male and female burials and a handful of female-only ones, turned up horse riding accessories – strong evidence that the activity was not the exclusive domain of men.

Oldest saddle

The saddle (circled in red) in situ in the Yanghai cemetery tomb.

Image credit: Wertmann et al., 2023, Archaeological Research in Asia (CC BY 4.0)

While horses have an extraordinarily long history of domestication by humans, the first few millennia of our shared existence mostly didn’t involve riding. Instead, horses were kept for meat and milk, with only a few pieces of evidence from Eastern Europe hinting at the animals’ use for personal transport. 

By the early second millennium BCE, however, riding was definitely established across Eurasia: not only is this the period where we find the earliest evidence for light spoke-wheeled chariots, but, starting in Mesopotamia and gradually radiating out across Egypt and the Near East, we start to see horses with riders turning up in art as well.

None of those artifacts, though, include a saddle. “[A] Mesopotamian terracotta plaque dated to ca. 1750 BCE […] shows a rider with reins and a whip, but no saddle, instead a simple surcingle-like strap, i.e. a separate belly strap encircling the saddle and the thorax of the horse to stay in seat,” explain the researchers. 

Similarly, “[a] horse without saddle-cloth controlled by a rider with bridle and whip is shown in the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Horemheb,” who ruled between 1319 and 1292 BCE. Even in the Assyrian Empire, when cavalry started being used as a tactical force in warfare, the team note that “riders sat on fringed, carpet-like saddle-cloths or pads in the shape of animal skins fixed with breast straps and cruppers.”

Advertisement

“Numerous depictions on stone reliefs from the royal Assyrian palaces at Nimrud and Nineveh […] show that bridles were used, but not saddles,” they confirm. 

While it may seem strange that it took so long to give up bareback riding, it’s understandable – at least for our rough-and-ready ancestors. “[T]he saddle was a relatively late development,” write the team, arriving only “when riders began to care more about comfort and safety and the health of the horses.”

Exactly when this happened is not known – in part because there’s usually very little physical evidence surviving after all this time. “Usually for something organic that’s this old, like leather, then we wouldn’t have any remnants of it, or very little,” Wilkin pointed out.

But if, as archaeologists suspect, it was around the mid-first millennium BCE, it would place the potentially 2,700-year-old new discovery right at the beginning of the history of the saddle – marking a turning point not just for the comfort of our butts, but for the spread of human civilizations and ideas as a whole.

Advertisement

“The invention of the saddle substantially improved horseback-riding,” the team write. “[It] not only revolutionized warfare, but also eased long-distance speedy movement across Eurasia.”

The study is published in Archaeological Research in Asia.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Take Five: Big in Japan
  2. Struggle over Egypt’s Juhayna behind arrest of founder, son – Amnesty
  3. Turkey seeks 40 F-16 jets to upgrade Air Force -sources
  4. NASA’s $180 Million Plan For Destroying The ISS Revealed

Source Link: 2,700-Year-Old Saddle Found In Ancient Chinese Tomb Is Oldest Ever Discovered

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version