Origin of the Alans

[Michael Kerr]

Alanus, is this the image of the Qin cavalry horse and groom that you tried to upload? Maybe image was corrupt so I downloaded from Facebook, opened in Photoshop and resaved as a jpg which usually works for me if image sometimes has corruption problems loading. So if it works it was more than likely the image was the problem not your profile, these things get tricky and frustrating sometimes. Back to the cavalry horse I see your point, there seems to definitely be some Pazyryk influence. The Qin defeated and drove out the Xiongnu from the Ordos in about 215 BC and it wouldn't surprise me if they had Yuezhi help so a Pazyryk influence on the Qin horses and gear does not surprise me considering the Xiongnu and Yuezhi were enemies. I would love to know the significance of the single crenallation though, I read in Miklos Jankovich's book They Rode into Europe which admittedly was aimed at horse lovers and not historians and was originally in Hungarian then translated to German and then into English from the German translation, that he thought that the crenallated mane was for riders to mount their horses easily but no source material unfortunately. The horse appears gelded as well which indicates a steppe influence I think Carolyn Willekes in her book on ancient horses alluded to that fact. If a Yuezhi horse then maybe that is what one of the two classes of the Pazyryk horses looked like with thicker legs than the long legged Southern Steppe horses like the extinct Turkomans.
Regards
Michael Kerr