Historical development. The first contact between humans and primitive forms of horse apparently took place in the Stone Age some 600,000 years ago. Stone Age man and his descendants hunted the horse for many thousands of years, ate its meat, dressed in its skin, and made tools from its bones.
The horse was domesticated around the 4th or 3rd millennium BC (first in Central Asia, Iran, and Scandinavia). In Central and Southern Europe, the domestic horse appeared in 3000-2000 B.C. Since then it has had a significant impact on military technology and tactics and has been widely used as a means of transportation, transportation and communication. Thus, man developed new needs, opportunities, and necessities for the use of the horse. Soon after the horse became a domesticated animal, people began to engage in horse breeding.
After the construction of horse-drawn chariots in ancient times and the later formation of the cavalry, it became necessary to exercise the new military technique in peacetime as well. At first, wildebeest hunting was carried out from the chariot. Later, in 2700 B.C., chariot races, horse races and equestrian games appeared. They were practiced as a sport for a long time by the ruling classes. Although combat or military chariots were last used in the 5th century B.C., sports chariot races were still held 900 years later. Chariot races were especially popular with the Greeks and Romans and were part of the Olympic games of antiquity until 393 AD.
After cavalry first appeared in the twelfth century BC, large mounted troops (cavalry) emerged in 850 BC and for a long time were the main military force.
The demands of warfare necessitated the development of equestrianism. The latter was especially developed among nomadic Asian and Indo-European pastoral peoples. Representatives of these peoples practiced the art of horseback riding and wielding weapons on horseback since childhood. Equestrian sports were widely developed. There also arose and equestrian games, which have survived to this day.
The way of riding ancient nomadic peoples along with accustoming and training the horse was based on using its natural abilities. The main goal was to maximize horses’ agility, endurance, and turning ability. Hicksos invented the tripod. The Arabs and Egyptians adopted the use of the horse from them. The Scythians used leather loops as stirrups. Riding was adopted from the Scythians by the Medes and then the Greeks. From 680 BC the program of the ancient Olympic games included horse racing.
The oldest book on hippology was written by Kikkuli from Mitanni in the XIV century B.C. This textbook was devoted to the issues of breeding and caring for harness horses and the basics of their dressage and training. The Greeks began to improve the dressage of horses. In 400 BC. Xenophonte wrote a book called On the Art of Riding. It was the second major work on hippology that has gone down in history. Xenophonte is considered the founder of the classic art of horseback riding.
With nomadic peoples, every healthy person had to be able to ride. On the contrary, in slave and feudal society, riding was considered the privilege of the male ruling class, who despised all physical work. Hunting on horseback with or without a pack of dogs (parfour hunting) and falconry along with equestrian competitions were the favorite equestrian exercises of knightly times. Given the demands of warfare in the Middle Ages and the need for knightly tournaments, heavy knightly horses began to be bred.
In the XV-XVIII centuries in Europe, various riding schools, academies and cavalry schools appeared everywhere to meet the needs of the rapidly developing horse breeding, and therefore the cavalry and equestrian sports. A whole galaxy of outstanding riders and founders of dressage (Pluvinel, Pignatelli, De Bourgetelle…) developed methods of preparing the horse for single combat or jousting with such necessary elements for attack and self-defense as volta, pirouette, levada, lansada, croupada, pesada, capriole, ballotada… These difficult elements (for example, ballotada – jumping in place, when the horse in the air, front legs are bent to the stomach and hind legs are straightened in the belly joints as if showing horseshoes) were trained with the help of such sometimes cruel devices as pilars, whips, spurs and mouthpieces of strict configuration.
Spanish and Neapolitan horses were considered the most suitable for such dressage – lush, proud, well-balanced “on the rear”. Later, as the methods of warfare improved, the need for such dressage for combat purposes disappeared, and it took on the characteristics of a theatrical spectacle.
The emergence of a qualitatively new English racehorse breed on the world stage in the 19th century demanded other methods of training. The Englishman James Phillis made a great contribution to the development of the art of horse dressage, who generalized and supplemented the experience of his great teachers – Earl D’Or and François Beauchet – in his work “Fundamentals of Dressage and Riding” (1890). He developed and systematized the methods of dressage from the first steps up to the higher school, proclaiming the main principle – “forward, always forward”, which meant practicing every element while the horse was moving, not standing still and without any additional devices. In Russia, the teachings of Phillis formed the basis of the new cavalry charter. To this day, the Russian school of dressage is based on the Phillis principles. The art of riding, which had been developed for centuries, now takes specific forms and is subject to strict rules and requirements accepted worldwide, although the struggle of different currents, schools and methods of dressage continues.
The undisputed leadership in dressage riding belongs to the German riders. At twenty Olympic Games they have won gold medals nine times in team classification and seven times in individual classification, at the last four times they were beyond competition, and Nicole Uphoff on Rembrandt twice became Olympic champion (1988, 1992). The Swedes had six gold medals as individuals, including two for Henry St. Cyr, and two for the team. Two gold medals in the individual competition belong to the Swiss (Hans Moser – 1948, Henri Chammarten – 1964). Three gold medals belongs to France (two in the team event in 1932 and 1948 and one in the individual event to Xavier Lesage). Austria has one Olympic champion – Elisabeth Teurer (1980).