HORSEPOWER
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Interactions between China, Mongolia and the steppe 2000-0 BCE
What is the Horsepower project?
It is said that ‘fences make good neighbours’, but more often it is the connections between people that have been historically important. Looking globally we see something of a contradiction: on the one hand, people in various parts of the world become different from each other, developing their own languages, material culture, customs, religion and so on and, on the other, ideas, people, materials, animals and plants were moving between regions. Of great interest is how outside influences are assimilated and made local across the globe.
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A crucially important historical example is the interaction between China* and the steppe over the last five thousand years or so. On the one hand, large populations have built up in a number of areas in China from at least 6000 years ago, as millet agriculture started in the north and rice growing in the south. These groups became unified through the common set of rituals to honour the ancestors, involving feasting by the living and increasingly elaborate tombs for the dead. The Chinese script certainly goes back to the Shang period starting around 1600 BCE and probably longer; there may also have been some commonality of spoken language. Large halls on mounded structures become common, bronzes of particular types and forms of decoration are found from the Shang onwards, carved jades are crucial ornaments and sacred objects.
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*I will use the term China to indicate the territory covered by that country today in the full knowledge that China has only achieved something like its current borders in the last 2200 years.
Archaeologists Mongolia 2025 by Miranda Creswell
To the north, in the areas comprising present-day Siberia, Mongolia and central Asia, life became more mobile, especially after the domestication of the horse between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea around 2200 BCE. At the same time the first fast wheeled vehicle, the chariot, developed (slower moving carts probably pulled by oxen go back to 4500 BCE). Horse riding gradually became more ubiquitous, with warfare with chariots to be followed from around 220 BCE by cavalry and truly mass horse cultures. As China settles down, the steppe springs into motion, linked over large areas by shared art and artefacts.
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Many important elements of life flowed from the steppe into China, including from around 3000 BCE domesticated sheep, goat and cows, wheat and barley, with later metallurgy in copper, bronze, gold and silver, but also people moving in both directions. The Chinese often took northern influences and reinvented them in their very striking local idioms. Most famous of these were bronzes, which first entered China as small personal ornaments, such as earrings and armlets, as well as knives, axes and weaponry. From the start of the Shang, bronze vessels for eating and drinking to honour the ancestors were made first in imitation of earlier pottery versions, but then from around 1200 BCE more elaborate and massive items emerged, made from complex casting techniques unlike those anywhere else in the world with extraordinarily complex decorations with stylised faces, animals and abstract swirls (see image). Some of the most sophisticated bronzes of the ancient world were made in China and also some of the largest: one so-called ding weighs 800 kg. In the central plains of China, along the lower stretches of the Yellow River, enormous foundries were created under state control, producing an incredible range and amount of bronzes.
Group of late Shang (1200-1046 BCE) bronze ritual vessels in the collections of the British Museum for holding wine, water and food for feasts in honour of the ancestors.
Contemporary with the late Shang in China, the first large-scale horse cultures emerge in Mongolia as evidenced by the huge ritual structures we now call khirgisuurs, the largest of which contain the remains of up to 2000 horses, sacrificed to honour the dead. It is probable that not all these horses were killed at once, so that groups returned to the monuments, perhaps on a seasonal basis to sacrifice horses, feast and probably exchange goods and maybe also marriage partners. Monuments were important in bringing together scattered and mobile groups on a regular basis, creating a sense of a broader social network (see videos elsewhere on the website with details of khirgisuurs and their excavation). Ancient Mongolians produced their own metals in sophisticated forms very different to those of China and using their own metal recipes and compositions.
Mongolian khirigsuur (Photo by Rory Carnegie)
As herds built up on the steppe, horses were introduced into China together with the chariot around 1200 BCE. What followed was a complex love-hate relationship between the settled and the mobile starting in the Shang and coming to an end with the fall of the Yuan dynasty (the Mongol rulers of China) in 1368. Relatively benign exchanges of horses, silk, metals and people occurred, helping to form both parties. The Chinese were also forced into one of the most famous fences in human history in the form of the Great Wall. It started in segments around 700 BCE, unified by the First Emperor into more of a single structure, with the best known brick section, visited by millions of tourists, built by the Ming emperors (1368-1644) after the departure of the Yuan to help prevent their return.
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The Horsepower project is following the first millennium and a half of this relationship starting with the first horses in Mongolia, probably around 1800 BCE, down to the formation of the first two major states of the region, the Xiongnu in Mongolia and the First Emperor as the Qin state expanded to unify China. Both states arose around 200 BCE. We are using the latest scientific advances in ancient DNA and the analysis of metals, to study the complicated movement of horses and of metals, as well as people. We also reflect on the nature of political power, of links to the ancestors and spirits through sacrifice and the development of art and ornament together giving us a sense of two very different worlds to our own, as they interact and change.
Horse skull (Photo by Rory Carnegie)
Details of the institutions and individuals involved in the project are given elsewhere on the website, as are the results as they emerge. An important part of the team is a creative group, making art in the form of photographs, paintings and drawings, but also videos informing international audiences of our aims and progress.
History is increasingly becoming global in scope as we realise that interactions between regions were crucial to many major historical developments. The Horsepower team is privileged to be looking in detail at one of the most important sets of global connections, that between the world of the steppe and the urban peoples to the south, in this case Mongolia and China.