Artist’s Sketch of a Horse

With only a few deft strokes of red and black ink, an Ancient Egyptian artist caught the elegant sweep of a horse in motion. Drawn upon a fragment of limestone, this lively study belongs to the Ramesside Period, c. 1300–1080 B.C., when the horse had become a familiar symbol of speed, prestige and royal power in Egypt.

Ostracon of Animals: Crane, Vulture & Hound

The animal was first lightly sketched in red before being finished with a fine, supple line of black ink; a technique associated with Ramesside draughtsmen working around Deir el-Bahari. The ostracon was recovered from rubbish accumulated in the courtyard of the Tomb of Nespakashuty (TT 312), although that area had been used over many centuries, making the precise circumstances of its creation difficult to reconstruct. Stylistically, however, the little horse sits comfortably amongst the work of Ramesside artists.

The Artists’ Rubbish Heap: Sketches from the Tomb of Nespakashuty

The Horse Before Egypt

For all its familiarity in later Egyptian art, the horse was a relative newcomer to the Nile Valley. It appears in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, amid increasingly close connections with Western Asia and the period of Hyksos rule in northern Egypt, c. 17th–16th centuries B.C. The horse and light chariot subsequently became fixtures of New Kingdom elite and military life. By the time of the Rammeside age, Egyptian artists had been observing horses for centuries: pulling royal chariots, charging across battlefields, accompanying processions and, occasionally, simply being allowed to be horses; spirited, graceful creatures worthy of study in their own right.

The deeper history of the domestic horse is still being rewritten, and archaeology has a habit of unsettling yesterday’s certainties. For many years, the Botai culture of northern Kazakhstan, c. 3500 B.C., was widely presented as the birthplace of horse domestication. Botai people certainly maintained an extraordinary relationship with horses, and recent genetic work still indicates some form of controlled horse husbandry there; yet their horses were not the ancestors of the domestic horses familiar today. Evidence once interpreted as bit-wear has also been questioned.

Ancient DNA now points instead towards the western Eurasian steppe, particularly the lower Volga–Don region, for the ancestry of the modern domestic horse. Genetic evidence suggests increasingly intensive human control and selective breeding between roughly 2700 and 2200 B.C., followed by an astonishing expansion from about 2200 B.C. onwards.

Within only a few centuries these horses spread across enormous reaches of Eurasia, eventually replacing most earlier local horse populations. This expansion coincided with a new age of horse-powered mobility and, shortly afterwards, the appearance of the famous spoke-wheeled chariots of the Sintashta world around the beginning of the second millennium B.C.

From the grasslands of Eurasia to the chariot courts of Egypt, the horse transformed the speed at which human beings could travel, communicate and wage war. Yet, our picture of those beginnings remain unfinished. Ancient DNA, newly excavated bones and fresh archaeological discoveries continue to refine (and sometimes overturn) what seemed settled only a generation ago.

Perhaps that makes this little Ramesside drawing all the more charming: more than three thousand years ago, an anonymous artist looked at one of history’s most transformative animals and, with a few graceful lines upon a scrap of limestone, simply tried to capture it.

Summary:

Artist’s Sketch of a Horse

New Kingdom, Ramesside Period, 19th-20th Dynasty, c. 1300–1080 B.C.

From the Tomb of Nespakashuty (TT 312), Deir el-Bahari

Met Museum. 23.3.33