For a long time, for the famous Terracotta Warriors of Qin Shi Huang, many people have such a question: the warriors are easy to say, the horses, or the qin army's war horses are used stallions or mares? The "Military Exhibition of Chinese Dynasties" on the first floor of the re-reinforced and renovated Military Museum exhibits the old Tibetan horse figurines and saddle horse figurines (replicas) collected from the Shaanxi Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit in the early years. It is generally believed that the horse breeds excavated from the Qin Figurine Pit are the existing original Chinese horse breeds, River Qu Horses. The head of the terracotta figurine is 1.72 meters high, the hoof to the mane is 1.33 meters high, and the body length is about 2 meters. According to the modern horse body size, it is divided into small horse breeds.
▲The military exhibition Chen Tao ma figurines are actually taken
For the highly realistic Qin pottery figurines, we can not only look at some of the indescribable parts that have been restored, but also judge from the teeth. It is common to see experienced horse doctors and horse workers open the mouth of the horse to check the age of the horse, but you may not know that you can also see the male and female of the adult horse by opening the horse's mouth. What exactly is this operation? The gender of a horse is reflected in the horse teeth, and in most cases, the stallion has 40 teeth and the mare has only 36. There are three types of purslane slitting teeth, molars and canine teeth. There are 6 teeth in the upper and lower jaws. According to the midline, it is divided into three pairs: incisors, middle teeth and corner teeth. The teeth cut like a cutter to cut the hay. The physiological structure of the horse determines that the front teeth are all-encompassing, that is, the incision angle of the front teeth is more prominent than the lower incisors, only when the horse eats grass, the upper and lower incisors can be completely engaged, and it is convenient to secrete saliva to digest the hay, if you see that the manger in the stable is not placed on the ground but hung too high or placed parallel to the horse's shoulder, this situation mostly means that the breeder does not understand the physiological structure of the horse, and long-term feeding will lead to malformations of the horse's teeth and affect the health of the horse.
▲The cut tooth structure of the horse
Horses have 12 molars on each side of their jaws, and like stone mortars, they are all dependent on them to chew horse forage. As the saying goes: "Three knives in the grass are also fattened without materials." The horse grass should be finely fed, and the horse will chew and grind it with its molars and eat it to digest it.
▲Profile of the horse molars
Stallions will only grow canine teeth when they are 4.5 years old to 5 years old, and there are 2 pieces on the top and bottom, for a total of 4 pieces. Mares have few or only traces of canine teeth.
▲ The skull of a stallion
Please note: The small teeth in front of the maxillary molars in the figure below are not canine teeth but wolf teeth, and wolf teeth are not counted in the number of 36 or 40 teeth. About 70% of horses have wolf teeth, the earliest known wolf teeth are 6 months after the birth of the horse, but generally appear at the age of 2 years, generally more stallions. Wolf teeth disappear as the horse chews hard objects or bites. Wolf teeth seriously affect the horse's title, resulting in the horse is not easy to control and affect the performance of the war horse, so the wolf teeth of the war horse should be removed.
▲ Another horse skull with wolf teeth
In addition to stallions and mares, there is also a mule horse. i.e. castrated stallions. Stallions are difficult to control when in heat, and in order to meet military needs, stallions that do not need to be kept as stallions are usually castrated, and the horses after castration are more stable and quiet, but not all war horses are mules. So the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses with realistic shapes are stallions? mare? Or the horse? Let's look at a set of images: many of the Pottery Horses of the Qin Dynasty, including the Pottery Horse Figurines of the Qin Driving Carriage in the Military Expo Exhibition, can be seen with obvious canine teeth, and some cannot be seen.
▲ Details of the head of the Chen Tao Yuan horse figurine in the military exhibition exhibition
▲The picture shows the collection of pottery horses in the Qin Dynasty in Shaanxi, and the second left pottery horse has obvious canine teeth
Is it possible that the sex of the pottery figurine with obvious canine teeth can be a mare? The answer is no. What about the canine-toothed terracotta figurines that are determined to be stallions? Not quite right.
▲The horse figurines excavated from the Qin Figurine Pit have both stallions and mule horses, which are divided into reel horses (left) and kurama horses (right) according to their uses.
Physical observations have proved that the pottery figurines excavated from the Qin Figurine Pit are all horses: there are sticks and no eggs, and some pottery saddle horse figurines are also like this. But there are other pottery saddle figurines with complete sexual organs, which are stallions. No mare has been found in the current Qin figurine excavations. Coincidentally, the eight white horses of the Qin Bronze Carriage Horse (exhibited by junbo with exquisite imitation replicas) are also horseback.
That is to say, in the Qin Dynasty, the horse was commonly used to drive the horse, which was used as a military riding horse, that is, a rampart and a horse. The excavated terracotta figurines should be modeled after horses in the Qin Palace stables. On the east side of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin, a number of Qin horse skeletons have been excavated from the stable pit of Shangjiao Village, and after actual measurement, the height, length and proportion of the head of the horse are similar to the pottery horse figurines excavated from the Qin Figurine Pit, and should be the same horse breed.
Castration is the estrus that controls the teenage stallion. Modern science proves that horses that are castrated before puberty are usually taller than they were when they grow into stallions. Although the modern West has not proved that early castration will harm the growth and development of small colts, many veterinarians in Germany, England and other countries have minimum age limit requirements in practice. Some practitioners perform castration between the ages of 1.5 and 2 before the colt reaches puberty. However, some horse farms that do not need to be professionally bred to breed their breeders will choose earlier castration.
It is generally believed that wild horses existed in China in the Paleolithic Age, and a large number of domestic horses were bred in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River during the Middle Shang Dynasty. As for the records of castrated animals, there are records of castrated pigs in oracle bones dating back to 3,000 years ago, and there has been no time for the conclusion of the horses excavated by archaeology because of their soft bodies. The Qin horse figurines have become the archaeological evidence of the early implementation of castration of Chinese horses, which is of great significance for the study of ancient Chinese horse breeding and the nature of the Qin terracotta pits. The pottery terracotta figurines exhibited at the military expo are rare exhibition halls other than the National Museum of China in Shaanxi Qin Shi Huang Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit, if you have the opportunity, you can go to visit and experience the charm of ancient Chinese military culture.
This article is the original manuscript of the Cold Weapons Research Institute. The original outline of the editor-in-chief and the author Leng Yan saw, any media or public account without written authorization shall not be reproduced, and the offender will be investigated for legal responsibility.