If you’ve gotten on a horse in the 21^st (or even 20^th) century, your experience probably went something like this: you placed one foot in a stirrup, heaving yourself into a large, rigid saddle that helped secure your seat. Today, the saddle and the stirrup are so ubiquitous in the horse-riding world as to almost be synonymous. But it hasn’t always been this way – in the earliest days of horse riding, riders rode nearly bareback, with only a simple bridle helping them guide and control their mounts. In the first millennium BC, early riders from Central Asia to the Roman empire rode with simple proto-saddles that were little more than soft pads. So when, and why, did these key technologies enter the ancient world?

Answers to this question have proven elusive. For many years, archaeological and textual data have pointed scholars to East Asia, where finds of artefacts like stirrups and ceramic figurines date to the early centuries AD, decades or centuries before their first appearance in western Eurasia. Some researchers suggest that the first stirrups were only single stirrups, suspended from a saddle on the animal’s left side to aid in mounting the horse. Eventually, these early stirrups were paired with a sturdy, rigid wooden frame saddle, allowing them to support a rider’s full weight while mounted. This unlocked a whole range of new activities on horseback, from riding heavily armored to using high-impact weapons in combat or standing in the saddle. This technology spread rapidly across the ancient horse-riding world, to the Arctic, the Sahara, and beyond.

Our new finds suggest that a key piece of this puzzle may have been missing. The recovery and scientific dating of a strikingly well-preserved wooden saddle from the cave of Urd Ulaan Uneet, located in western Mongolia, indicates that riders in the region’s Altai Mountains rode and used one of the world’s oldest wooden frame saddles as early as the 4^th century AD. The saddle’s design and other recent finds in the region show that stirrups, too, were present in the Mongolian steppes by around this same time. Analysis of the materials used in the saddle’s construction, from birch wood to horse leather, suggest that the equipment was locally sourced. Together, these finds are among the earliest in the world – and raise the possibility that the steppes of Mongolia were a home for the innovation or at least very early adoption of these key riding technologies. Perhaps these early innovations helped play a role in important social changes in the region, such as the rise of the Rouran Khaganate, an early steppe empire that had a significant impact on ancient Eurasia during the 4^th century and beyond.

There’s a lot more work to do to understand the origins of riding technology like the saddle and the stirrup, and to investigate the role of steppe cultures in shaping it through collaborative archaeological research – but so far, the work that’s been done suggests that the important contributions of steppe cultures may have been underestimated so far in western archaeology. So, the next time you mount a horse, whether your saddle is labeled “English,” “Western”, or some other style – consider thanking the innovators of East Asia and the Mongolian steppe.

The associated article The origins of saddles and riding technology in East Asia: discoveries from the Mongolian Altai is out now, open access in Antiquity.

Featured Image: Birch composite frame saddle from Urd Ulaan Uneet, Jamsranjav Bayarsaikhan