Photo by Dan Huby

Wordless Wednesday and Wordless Wednesday on About

After Sunday's column on White Horses and Genetics, I've had some good comments, an excellent question and some assistance from some colleagues.

First, Katherine, our excellent guide to Horses, says that she has known some dappled horses to take more than 10 years to turn completely white.

N.S. Gill, our fabulous guide to Ancient History, tells me that the name Leucippus (leucippos/leukippus/leukippos) means "white horse" in Greek. Leukos/leucos is white and hippus/os is horse. Leucippus was a Pre-Socratic philosopher who developed the atomist theory, and lived between about 480-420 BC.

And finally, Leif Andersson, lead author of the academic article from which Sunday's column was written, wrote to ask if I was aware of any other ancient white horses, other than that mentioned in Herodotus. Here's what I could come up, in roughly chronological order:

• The Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic with roots perhaps as old as 1200-800 BC, contains several references to white horses
• Uffington Horse, 1000 BC, geoglyphic art carved into the upland chalk of Dover Oxfordshire, about 130 miles WNW of Dover, which is probably cheating, but is the only thing I could find to make a nice picture. It's cheating because you couldn't carve any but a white horse into the chalk.
• Lysistrata, a darkly comic play by the Greek playwright Aristophanes about some women taking steps to stop their men from fighting in useless wars and written about 411 BC, includes some dialogue about finding a white horse for a sacrifice.
• Kung-sun Lung (aka Gongsun Long), was a Chinese philosopher who lived between 325–250 BC, and he wrote a famous essay about reality and logic called the The White Horse Dialogue.
• The book of Revelations 6:2 and 19:11 in the New Testament of the Judeo-Christian bible, written in the first century AD, references a white horse.
• The Mabinogion is a Welsh myth which comes from two manuscripts dated between AD 1350 and 1410. In it, the horse goddess Rhiannon rides in on a white horse to meet the hero Pwyll. The Mabinogion, for what that's worth, is thought by some scholars to be based on the Mahabharata.

If anybody has any other suggestions, please feel free to comment!

The Archaeology Channel has a new video up, this one from the Georgia Department of Transportation, on recent investigations searching for a 19th century side-wheel steamer called the USS Water Witch. A Union ship captured in 1864 by confederate forces, the Water Witch was scuttled in Georgia’s Vernon River to prevent its recapture. The 18 minute Water Witch video documents the ship’s rediscovery by remote sensing during an archaeological survey by the Georgia Department of Transportation ahead of a bridge construction project.

Video Catalog at The Archaeology Channel. Scroll down the page to the Water Witch video, and be sure set your browser to allow popups.