The Europeans Take Over
ANYONE RIDING A horse automatically feels “superior” to people who are not riding horses. They feel that way because they are looking down on the pedestrians, knowing that the pedestrians will always get out of their way.
On a horse, one “naturally” gets to thinking about rulers and the ruled. If a mounted person on a horse gives an order to an unmounted person, the unmounted person has reduced options when deciding how to respond to that order.
There have been places and times when ownership of horses was forbidden to disfavored groups of people. Horses were (and still are) expensive, and you have to have a certain level of financial comfort to be able to maintain them.
If you were a farmer, you likely didn’t keep horses, you had donkeys maybe or an ox. If you had horses, you were likely an officer in an army, or some kind of noble. In some places a rich merchant was allowed to own horses, other places they were forbidden, because they were not noble enough. They spent all their time making money instead of practicing the noble art of war.
From before 1000 BCE, successive waves of people came out of Central Asia as marauding hordes. The earliest brought horses. Horsemen overran and conquered donkeymen. After a few centuries, they brought iron weapons to destroy the wielders of the old bronze weapons.
Each successive group came with a technological innovation involving horses and iron that gave them an edge against the city and settled agriculture societies of the metropolitan zones of the Mediterranean and East Asia. For example, stirrups were brought to the attention of Western cultures by the Parthians of the third century BCE. Now
