Los relieves asirios como fuente de documentación equinotécnica

Abstract

During the Bronze Age, the equids that substituted the existing ones in the Middle East (onagers, donkeys, and hybrids), came from the migrating euro Asiatic nomad people who crossed the Caucasus and settled in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and other surrounding regions, constituting riding or drafting animals for the new power centers: the Hittite, the Mitanni, the Hurrian, the Assyrian, and the Hyksos, among others. The representation of these animals in the Assyrian relief carvings from the Middle Empire, during Shalmaneser III, Sennacherib and Assurbanipal times, allow us to know a type of locomotion, of ambling that stockbreeders currently consider as a defect that must be eliminated. In another case, on the occasion of a delivery tribute to Shalmaneser III, in Nimrud’s Black Obelisk, it is observed that the position and the morphology of a horse are those of the defining traits of what we now know as the Arab purebred (AA).