The Rouran Khaganate (also known as Ruan-Ruan) was a powerful confederation of nomadic Proto-Mongol tribes that dominated much of Inner Asia from the 4th to 6th centuries AD. Under the leadership of a Great Khan, this aggressively militarized Empire was based on a feudal system that controlled trade routes while ruthlessly raiding oases and outposts.
Their name comes from the Chinese chronicles of the time, which were recorded in the Wei Shu, a historical text compiled between the years 551 and 554. According to these documents, the Rouran were little more than “thieves of the steppe” who adopted a strategy of raids and extortion in northern China.
The Khaganate took control of Inner Asia through stunning battlefield victories. "Our findings raise the compelling possibility that the rise of the Rouran was favored by technological supremacy linked to the early use of metal saddles and stirrups," the archaeologists say in an article published in the journal Antiquity.
Your hypothesis is not at all unfounded. Using radiocarbon dating, experts have just dated a wooden chair found in a human and horse burial in the Urd Ulaan Uneet cave in western Mongolia. The results indicate that it dates back to around 420 AD, making it the oldest example of a true saddle in East Asia.
"These new improvements in equestrian combat may have contributed to the formation of the first steppe polities," the authors state. “The rise of this Empire would probably not have been possible without this advanced technology, which could have dramatic implications for our understanding of the history of Central and East Asia,” they add.
The saddle was built with a wooden frame to be sturdy on a horse's back, making it easy to add stirrups. As such, it was capable of carrying more weight and provided the rider with greater control, allowing for different types of mounted combat.
“Despite their ubiquity in modern equestrian activities, saddles and stirrups were not used during the first centuries of horsemanship,” say specialists. "Its development revolutionized mounted warfare and contributed to far-reaching social change throughout Eurasia," they note.
To trace the beginnings of this revolution, a team of archaeologists from different institutions in Asia, Europe and North America studied the Urd Ulaan Uneet saddle, a tomb that was looted in 2015. Police were able to recover a painted birch saddle in black and red with leather straps on each side, an iron bit, wooden archery equipment, the bones of a man who was buried dressed in sheep and badger skins and the remains of mummified horses.
Detailed analysis has found that the objects were made of nearby materials. The leather comes from a domestic horse raised in the area and the wood is from local birch trees. This suggests that the equine cultures of the eastern Eurasian steppe not only used this new riding technology, but were also instrumental in its development and manufacture.
There are also other finds in Mongolia dating from approximately the same period and including early metal stirrups. Previous saddle technology was less suitable for mounted combat and traveling on horseback at high speeds.
Technological advances, researchers note, facilitated horseback combat and likely contributed to the success of the Rouran khaganate. Modern horses were first domesticated around 2000 BC. in Asia, but the riders rode bareback armed with bows and arrows and holding onto the horse with their legs while holding onto the mane.
Within a few centuries, the nomads who roamed the northern steppes – who made the horse one of the bases of their lives – invented the bridle and the bit, and around 1000 BC they began to ride on a soft pad, but they had nothing to do with the chairs.
Still, these technological changes were hard on the horses. The specimen found in Urd Ulaan Uneet had, in addition to marks on its ears (probably to show who it belonged to), damage to its teeth and changes in the nasal bones, similar to lesions found in other burials in central and eastern Asia.
