Horse burial

Horse burial is the practice of burying a horse as part of the ritual of human burial, and is found among many Indo-European peoples and others, including Chinese and Turkic peoples. The act indicates the high value placed on horses in the particular cultures and provides evidence of the migration of peoples with a horse culture. Human burials that contain other are rare; in Britain, for example, 31 horse burials have been discovered but only one cow burial, unique in Europe. This process of horse burial is part of a wider tradition of horse sacrifice. An associated ritual is that of chariot burial, in which an entire chariot, with or without a horse, is buried with a dead person.

The horse carries great symbolic meaning in human cultures (see horse worship). In Celtic and Germanic cultures, for instance, the horse "could be associated with the journeying sun", and horses were deified and used in divination, but Celtic horse sacrifice is rare whereas horses were regularly sacrificed and buried alongside dead humans in Germany and Scandinavia. The Indo-European ubiquity and importance of horse sacrifice (which in many cases involves a symbolic coupling between king and mare) attests to this importance.

Considerable differences exist between different horse burials even within a single area and culture, so much so that it is perhaps impossible to generalize. Sometimes horses were cremated, sometimes buried; sometimes they were placed in the same grave as humans, sometimes in a different pit; some cultures appear to favor horse burial for male warriors, others did not seem to differentiate in gender.

The practice of horse burial is bound to the historical territory covered by the domesticated horse, which initially was the Eurasian Steppe, ca. 4000–3500 BCE. Early cultures with a mythology that would support horse burial are those in or bordering those areas—Turkic cultures, Chinese cultures, and Indo-European cultures.

It is claimed that a form of horse burial is attested from the Paleolithic, when the skin of a horse was hung over a pole; some of the animal's bones were left inside the skin to preserve its shape. This supposed "head and hooves" culture, however, is only one explanation for archeological finds from the third millennium BCE. The earliest proven horse burial in the Old World dates back to the fifth or fourth millennium BC and is found in S'ezzhee, in a cemetery on the Volga from the Samara culture. Thousands of years later, Herodotus described the practice among the Scythians. Typically, such burials involved the sacrifice and burial of one or more horses to accompany the remains of high-ranked members or warriors. In China, horse burials (including chariots) are found beginning in the Shang Dynasty (1600–1100 BCE). Remains of the ritual are found in Kazakh culture, where a dead person's horse is slaughtered a year after its owner's death, in a ceremony accompanied by horse races. Horse burial and related rituals survived among other peoples as well into recent times, for instance among the Nez Perce people (where skinned and stuffed horses were used as grave monuments) and the Blackfoot Confederacy.

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