The Sacrificed Horse of the Indo-Europeans

The domestication of the horse on the Eurasian steppe reorganised warfare, trade and the spread of languages, and the animal's religious importance tracks that impact. Horse sacrifice is attested across the Indo-European traditions in forms too similar to be coincidental: the Vedic ashvamedha, in which a consecrated stallion roamed for a year before being sacrificed to affirm a king's sovereignty; the Roman October Horse; and Irish and Scandinavian parallels. Norse tradition gives Odin the eight-legged Sleipnir, the finest of horses, born of Loki and able to carry its rider between the worlds. The horse is praised in hadith, and the Prophet's night journey is made on the steed Buraq.

A very different horse belongs to Greek epic: the Trojan Horse, the hollow wooden effigy that let Greek soldiers inside the walls of Troy, is described in the Odyssey and given its fullest telling in Virgil's Aeneid, and it has left the English language its own idiom for a threat smuggled in under a welcome guise. In Britain the horse also became a landscape: the Uffington White Horse, a stylised chalk figure cut into a Berkshire hillside, has been dated by soil analysis to the late Bronze Age, roughly three thousand years old, making it by far the oldest of England's chalk hill figures and of uncertain original purpose.