The First Teachers on Record: Kikkuli, Simon and Xenophon

Every teacher of horsemanship had a teacher. Follow the line back far enough and the names give out, but the writing does not stop where you might expect. People were setting down how to train horses on clay tablets before anyone was riding in a saddle.

Kikkuli of Mitanni

The oldest training text that survives was found in the ruins of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire, in what is now Turkey. It dates from about the fourteenth century BC and it names its author in its first line: Kikkuli, master horse trainer of the land of Mitanni.

The text is a program for conditioning chariot horses, laid out day by day across roughly seven months. It specifies distances at different paces, feeding, watering, washing and rest. There is nothing in it about the horse's mind. It is all schedule. What it shows is that by then horse training was a profession with experts, methods and a body of knowledge worth importing from another country.

Simon of Athens

The first Greek known to have written on horsemanship was an Athenian named Simon. Almost all of his work is lost. He survives mainly because a later writer quoted him with respect, and because of one remark that writer passed on: what a horse does under compulsion it does without understanding, and there is no more grace in it than in a dancer driven with a whip.

Xenophon

The later writer was Xenophon, an Athenian soldier and a student of Socrates, who lived from about 430 to about 354 BC. His short book On Horsemanship is the oldest complete work on the subject that we have, and a rider today can read it and nod.

He begins with how to judge a horse, starting at the feet. He goes on to stabling, grooming, mounting and the rider's seat. Through all of it runs a rule about conduct. Never approach a horse in anger, he writes, because anger does things that have to be regretted. See that the young horse comes to connect people with comfort, food and relief. When the horse does what is asked, reward it at once by easing off.

That last instruction is pressure and release, set down twenty-four centuries ago.

What was lost and found

Xenophon's advice did not carry the day. For long stretches of the history that follows, force was the method and his book was a curiosity for scholars. It was printed again in the Renaissance, when the riding academies of Italy and France went looking for classical authority, and the masters of those schools argued, as people still do, over how much of him to follow.

The Two Rein starts here on purpose. The idea that a horse learns best when it understands and is not afraid was not discovered in the American West. It has been found, lost and found again, and each time it was carried forward by particular people. The rest of this history is about who they were.