In pre-Mycenaean Greece there was n

In pre-Mycenaean Greece there was no developed tradition of horse transportthat was not stimulated by the invention of the horse-drawn chariot. In contrast,on the Eurasian steppe horsemanship was known from the 4th millennium BC tothe 3rd millennium in a zone from the Dnieper to the Ural which defined thehorse-using cultures, the formation of a cult of the horse (Kuz’mina 1977) andthe tradition of sacrificing horses in burials, which only appeared in Greece withthe arrival of the Mycenaean dynasty; the burial of two horses was uncovered inthe dromos of a tholos at Marathon (Vanderpool 1959: 277-283). In contrast, inthe steppe the ancient horse-raising tradition led to the development of horsetraining. The intensive quest for the most effective methods of harnessing isevident from the wide variety and instability of variants of cheek-pieces in thesteppe on sites of the Potapovka and Petrovka-Sintashta cultures. All of thispoints to the conclusion that the formation of cheek-pieces of Type I originatedin the Eurasian steppe where the largest number of cheek-pieces are known, andthe most archaic examples devoid of any decoration are known from the Abashevo and Catacomb-Multi-roller Ware cultures. On the border of the Middleand Late Helladic periods the chariot and paired horses with disc-shaped cheekpieces from the steppe found their way into Greece.