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
DoverOxfordshire, 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!
Comments
Wow, that glyph is amazing! Is it just carved out of the turf, into chalk, or is it something applied to the ground?
I don’t know much about horses, unfortunately. I do love the Golden Horses of Turkmenistan, though — the Ahal Teke. They really do have a golden sheen… except for the “greys”!
I have to agree, that is an amazing glyph and picture from the air.
I have to say I’ve seen some black foals go dapple as they matured and then white too as they age. Gray horses colors always seem to change with age.
Amazing sight! Happy WW and thank you for stopping by! I’m bookmarking your blog
While I am familiar with much of the Bible, Revelations 19:11 was a passage I don’t recall reading before.
“Then I saw heaven standing open, and there was a white horse! Its rider is named Faithful and True. He administers justice and wages war righteously.”
I have just recently bought the History Channel’s series “The Presidents” on DVD. From that series I learned that George Washington had a white horse named “Nelson”. After being elected president he frequently traveled by carriage. But before going into a town he would get out of the carriage and ride Nelson into town.
Uffington is carved into the bedrock, and has been maintained by cleaning out the cutmarks, well, I guess three thousand years, off and on. Pretty amazing.
Amazing what people had time to do before the era of Television and computers. Wonder what they would think if they could see an arial view?
Beautiful picture. But what I always wonder is *how* did they get the idea to make this big picture that you can only see from the air?
I suspect that like so much contemporary environmental art, the people responsible for first creating the Uffington Horse drew or graphed it out in small scale first, then plotted it out on the landscape.
Why? My personal suspicion is that they wanted to make it something uniquely given to their deities. People couldn’t access the image (and possibly besmirch it with their mortal eyes?).
Have we missed Pegasus? The Greek hero Bellerophon, son of Poseidon, captured Pegasus at the fountain of Pirene with the help of Athena and rode him in his battle against the Chimera and the Amazons. In Horace Carmina 4.11, line 25 he refers to the story of Bellerophon and Pegasus. Bellerophon attempted to ride Pegasus to Mount Olympus,
The White Horse is the ancient emblem of the Cantware, the People of Kent (UK). It is possibly referenced as early as Nennius’ ‘Historia’ where he refers to a battle between two ‘dragons’ (i.e. draca — Roman-style cavalry banners) one red and one white, symbolising Vortigern, King of the Britons and Hengest, King of Kent respectively.
The White Horse features strongly also in Vogul mythology as being the means by which Numi-Tarem (the Sun) travelled across the sky each day, and of his two sons, Gander Prince and Csaba, and how one son stole the horse and rode it across the sky to emulate (or perhaps try to replace) his father. Csaba is also a hero to the ancient Magyars. Their mythology is also closely tied in with a similar legend of two brothers on horseback riding a very long distance chasing a stag. One brother was the ancestor of the “white” Magyars, the other of the “black”.