Horse

The domestication of the horse on the Eurasian steppe reorganised warfare, trade and the spread of languages, and the animal's religious importance tracks that impact. Horse sacrifice is attested across the Indo-European traditions in forms too similar to be coincidental: the Vedic ashvamedha, in which a consecrated stallion roamed for a year before being sacrificed to affirm a king's sovereignty; the Roman October Horse; and Irish and Scandinavian parallels. Norse tradition gives Odin the eight-legged Sleipnir, the finest of horses, born of Loki and able to carry its rider between the worlds. The horse is praised in hadith, and the Prophet's night journey is made on the steed Buraq.

A very different horse belongs to Greek epic: the Trojan Horse, the hollow wooden effigy that let Greek soldiers inside the walls of Troy, is described in the Odyssey and given its fullest telling in Virgil's Aeneid, and it has left the English language its own idiom for a threat smuggled in under a welcome guise. In Britain the horse also became a landscape: the Uffington White Horse, a stylised chalk figure cut into a Berkshire hillside, has been dated by soil analysis to the late Bronze Age, roughly three thousand years old, making it by far the oldest of England's chalk hill figures and of uncertain original purpose.

The horse is the seventh sign of the Chinese zodiac, sitting at the midpoint of the cycle and associated with the hours around noon and, in the elemental scheme, with fire and full yang, the peak of the day and of active energy. As a birth-sign it is read for energy, sociability, independence and a love of freedom and movement, sometimes to the point of restlessness or impatience. The horse's standing in Chinese culture as the mount of officials and warriors, and as an emblem of speed and success, feeds the calendrical reading, which is among the most consistently positive of the twelve.

In Chinese art the horse achieved one of its most celebrated commemorations in the Six Steeds of Zhaoling, stone bas-relief carvings of the six warhorses ridden by the Tang emperor Taizong in the battles that founded his dynasty, carved for his tomb in the seventh century; two of the six panels were removed and are now held in the University of Pennsylvania Museum, a removal still contested by Chinese authorities. The horse's positive place in the zodiac is reinforced by this long artistic tradition of celebrating war-horses individually by name, a practice with few parallels for any other zodiac animal.