The Age of the Horse by Susanna Forrest

Author:Susanna Forrest [Forrest, Susanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802189516
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2016-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

II

Horseflesh is dark, with more blood to it than beef or mutton, and, as prehistoric hunters knew and the Botai found when they became horsekeepers, is well supplied with fatty acids and vitamins. The fat is easy to digest, and the meat itself is lean. It has a sweet, gamey flavour. For millions of years, the most complicated issue with hippophagy was catching the horse, but after a millennium of domestication by horse-eating pastoralists on the steppe, horses arrived in the Middle East, and there was an abrupt rupture in their perception and treatment. Their meat no longer figures as human food.

‘My flesh [is not] eaten,’ says the first talking horse in literature, in fragments of Babylonian cuneiform dating from the seventh century BC. He is a prestigious creature, ‘glorious in battle’, clothed in expensive copper armour and credited with the ‘heart of a lion’. He is not for eating, unlike the ox with whom he contrasts himself, but an expensive foreign import, lifted above the means of ordinary farmers and into the realm of kings and armies as a weapon of war drawing a chariot. The Mitanni horseman Kikkuli said that a trained horse was worth twice as much as an ox used for plough work, and an untrained horse twice as much as a cow. One horse cost the same as a small flock of sheep. This prestige was partly the result of the horse’s military role, but also the product of the simple economics of biology and climate. Horses process their food less efficiently than a cud-chewing bovid, and thrive on large quantities of poor-quality roughage like the steppe grasses. In the Middle East their meals had to be supplemented with more expensive barley and other grains.

By the time the Old Testament was written, equids were forbidden flesh. ‘Say to the Israelites: “Of all the animals that live on land, these are the ones you may eat: You may eat any animal that has a divided hoof and that chews the cud,”’ states Leviticus, and where Leviticus led, Christianity would follow. However, the Bible includes a loophole: it never explicitly mentions horses, unlike camels, which also are not eaten. Furthermore, after the flood, God tells Noah, ‘Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you,’ which some believe cancels out Leviticus’s food taboos – pork and rabbit were happily consumed by later Christians.

In Islam the horse had an exalted role carrying the Prophet and was highly valued in war, as it had been in Kikkuli’s time. The Qur’an mentions horses for riding and for display, but is silent on the topic of horsemeat. Some scholars argue that horsemeat is not haram but instead makrooh – undesirable or even offensive. Others cite a hadith which suggests that hippophagy was permissible: ‘On the day of Khaybar we slaughtered horses, mules, and asses. The Messenger of Allah forbade us (to eat) mules and asses, but he did not forbid horse-flesh.’ Wild horses were eaten in North Africa in Leo

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