If you like this work, please click on the upper right to "follow" . Thank you for your encouragement and support, and hope it will bring you a comfortable reading experience. As an ancient military force, the cavalry has flourished in China for more than a thousand years. Until the War of Liberation, the cavalry of the People's Liberation Army still made considerable contributions to the battles of Liaoshen, Huaihai , Pingjin and other battles.
On the Founding Ceremony , the cavalry troops also showed their heroic posture during the military parade.
However, with the acceleration of the mechanization process of our country's military since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the cavalry gradually withdrew from the historical stage under the development of motor vehicles such as motorcycles and armored vehicles.
During the disarmament in the 1980s, my country completely eliminated the "mule-horse transformation" of the army, and the cavalry as a military was completely abolished.
And horses, a livestock with great strategic significance, have accompanied the Chinese people through three to four thousand years of history.
It is no exaggeration to say that the quality of a horse and the combat effectiveness of a cavalry are related to the rise and fall of every dynasty.
Chinese wild horse
Although wild horse herds are rarely seen in today's China, there were still many wild horse herds in ancient China. In the Pleistocene era 10,000 years ago, there were still many wild horse herds. Many horse bones were unearthed from the early sites of the Longshan culture.
However, in the late Neolithic period, the horse population in China may have gradually decreased and even completely extinct due to climate changes. This is likely to be caused by human hunting.
But no matter what, horses are rarely seen in tombs ranging from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago.
However, with the development of gene technology in recent years, we were surprised to find that among some southern populations of horses, there were genes different from European Tatar wild horses and Central Asian Platz wild horses, indicating that at least during the domestication of domestic horses, there were still a certain number of populations in northern China.
However, compared with in Central Asia, the Przech Mustang in Europe and the Tatar Mustang, the population of the northern Mustang is relatively shorter .
and, in the Xia Dynasty and even earlier mythological and legendary era, horses existed in a wild state. People's use of horses is like wild animals such as deer and roe deer. They are mostly used for hunting. In the early days, they only domesticated relatively small animals such as sheep, pigs, and dogs.
Central Asian grasslands, domesticated domestic horses
To talk about the earliest domesticated horses, it is recognized worldwide as the Central Asian region 6,000 years ago. There are a large number of Platz wild horses living on the vast Central Asian grasslands.
The ancient Central Asians who made their living by nomads and hunting in the early days were in their shared lives with these wild horse populations, and by chance domesticated wild horses as a source of meat and milk.
So in the early days, horses were not used as means of transportation. Even if they were transported with Malay , they mostly wrapped a small amount of goods onto the horse's body, or dragged items such as boards to drag them.
cannot carry out large-scale effective transportation. Maybe you will ask, why not use a car? Because there was no such thing as cars in Central Asia at that time.
Later, it was about 5,500 years ago , the Mesopotamian Plain , perhaps it was , the Sun worship , or perhaps it was inspired by the wheels that made pottery, the Mesopotamian Plain region invented the wheels.
After all, Central Asia and West Asia are geographically adjacent, and there is no too much difficult geographical barrier, so the wheel soon spread to Central Asia.
Under the blessing of ancient Babylon's wheel, the horse began to play its role as a means of transportation and was domesticated and breeded more widely. The appearance of domestic horses in China is a little later.
Until , which is equivalent to the Xia Dynasty, , and other sites such as Erlitou culture , did not see any existence related to the domestication of the family horse, and no "Xuanyuan" and the wheel invented by Huangdi have been unearthed.
We cannot rule out the possibility that Huangdi, the founder of humanities, independently invented the wheel 5,000 years ago, but from the chronological order of technology spread from west to east, it is more likely that the invention of wheel technology spreads from west to east. The same is true for domesticating domestic horses.
The ancestor of the Shang Dynasty first trained wild horses
In ancient records, "the best man rides a horse, and the Hai is a cow." During the Xia Dynasty, the ancestors of the Shang tribe, the third leader of the Shang country, Xiangtu , taming wild horses with horse taming technology, and horses only existed in the livestock herds of the Central Plains civilization.
In archaeological discoveries, the domestication of Przech wild horses in Xinjiang was roughly at this time, so whether these domestic horses were introduced from Central Asia, or were they invented by the ancestors of the Shang Dynasty themselves or were they different.
The domestic horses we are using now are undoubtedly introduced from Central Asia. After all, since Zhang Qian went to the Western Regions , the Central Plains region has established stable ties with Central Asia and even West Asia. The local horse breeds in China have long been hybridized by tall populations in West Asia for countless generations, and the genes of local horses only account for 2.7% of them.
The Shang people at that time lived in the current Hebei region. In addition, the Shang people's business and farming traditions were likely to be constantly migrating, and they exchanged with the nomads of the Inner Mongolia Plateau and learned horse training techniques from Central Asia.
was largely domesticated in the Central Plains population at that time, and the first batch of domestic horses in the Central Plains civilization appeared.
Of course, we cannot rule out that the merchants independently invented the technology to domesticate horses. After all, the distribution areas of Chinese wild horses at that time were mainly concentrated in Qinghai, Gansu, Xinjiang, Shandong, Hebei and other places.
At that time, the connection between the west of Jiayuguan and the hinterland of the Central Plains was almost cut off, and horse training technology could only be spread to the Central Plains through Hexi Corridor or Mongolian Plateau .
So if it was a family, it should be that the Xia Dynasty, which was established by the Western Qiang ethnic group at that time, first came into contact with this technology, rather than the Shang people, which originated in Northeast China and had a range of growth activities intertwined with the Dongyi tribes in Shandong. The connection between
can only be cultivated and domesticated by the nomadic peoples in today's Beijing area and the Mongolian Plateau, under the rigid migration needs of the merchant ethnic group's slash-and-burn farming agriculture.
It is worth mentioning that all our horses today originated in the Americas, but the primitive horses in the Americas have gradually faded away in the long river of history, giving the local Indians in the Americas no chance to tame the wild horses alone.
But they also domesticated other species according to local conditions to replace horses for animal transportation, that is alpaca . Although
alpacas can also be transported, their size and capacity are much worse than tall horses. Similar to the alpacas in the Americas are the Eskimos sled dog , the Nordic reindeer , etc.
But there is another fatal disadvantage of alpaca transportation in the Americas, that is, it has not used large-scale inventions such as wheels for transportation.
Shang and Zhou chariots, the Kingdom of Thousand Vehicles
After mastering the technology of domesticating horses and making wheels, the Shang people quickly rose in North China Plain .
Especially when , which is considered to be the "Shangzu", is doing business in the Yishui River , and was killed by the king of Yi Kingdom when he saw money, the rise of the Shang people began.
Wang Hai's son , on-jiawei and , the Yellow River basin, established a military alliance, and the country destroyed and annexed. Since then, it has also shown national prestige and dignity in the Central Plains. , the Xia Dynasty also has no sense of gain or loss for the rise and fall of Yi country outside its control.
Plus, Shangjia Weishi was famous, and it was to avenge his father to deal with Youyi Kingdom. Therefore, the Xia Dynasty did not make any suppressive moves on the Shang tribe who annexed Youyi Kingdom. As long as you still admit that I am the co-lord of the world, everything is easy to negotiate.
Although horses were domesticated during the Jingtu period, they were not sure whether the breed was bad or the number was too rare. Until the seventh generation leader of Shang State, Wang Hai, the ox cart was still used as the main tool.
The current speculation may be that the roads were too rugged at that time. Compared with horses, cattle, although the speed is slower, the transportation volume is larger and more stable, and the safety is higher.
But since there are all ox carts and horses have been domesticated for many years, the carriage that can be created with a different livestock must also exist.
Moreover, the invention of horse carriages for the merchant nations, such as the wandering and farming nations, is far beyond other civilizations in the Central Plains, so the rapid rise of the merchant nation is also closely related to horse carriages.
Later, the role of a carriage is no longer as simple as a means of transportation. The new soldier, the main characteristic of horses, was born.
According to historical records, the earliest record of using chariots in ancient China was used when Xia Qi fought against the Youhu clan in Huxian, Shaanxi Province today.
Although China's bronze civilization was still in its early stages at this time and the output was not high, it was still used on a certain scale.
Scholars believe that with the emergence of metals such as bronze, the Xia Dynasty had already had the ability to make tanks. In the middle of the Xia Dynasty, when the Shang Dynasty was spread to Shangwang Hai and Shangjiawei, the chariots were already widely used and in war.
Historically developed to in the early days of in the Shang Dynasty, and " Carriage " already existed in the military branches of the dynasty.
"Shangshu·Mu Yu" Kong Shu quoted "Fengsus Tong" and said: "The car has two wheels, so it is called two (vehicles).".
"Mozi Minggui" says that "Tang uses nine cars, birds and geese travel in the formation" to attack the summer.
Conclusion:
These records show that chariot manufacturing and chariot wars in the late Xia and early Shang dynasties have made great progress. Although we cannot be sure whether the car was first transmitted from the Hexi Corridor to the Western Qiang ruling area of the Xia Dynasty, or from the Mongolian Plateau in the north to the hands of Shang people who were good at taming birds, beasts and horses in the northeast.
But at least during the Xia and Shang dynasties, horses were already used in transportation and war, which played a great role in the expansion of the entire Chinese civilization area.
In culture, horses are also a very important image. The old horse knows the way, the Bole looks at the horse, the dragon horse spirit, the horse tramples its front hoof, the noon horse among the twelve zodiac signs, etc., horses have deeply penetrated into the daily life of Chinese civilization.
It can be said that without horses, there will be no unified China.
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