Horses were domesticated around 4000 BC, but stirrups took millennia to follow
Stirrups are often ranked among the biggest military inventions before gunpowder, yet they came remarkably late. Riders in India used a simple loop for the big toe by the second century BC, but the paired stirrup emerged in Jin-dynasty China during the 4th century AD and later spread across Eurasia.
A stirrup is a light frame or ring hung from the saddle by a strap to hold the rider's foot, helping with mounting and balance. Its name traces to stigrap, an Old English term for a rope used to climb aboard. Early riders tucked their feet under the girth, and the barefoot horsemen of warm south and central India used a looped rope for the big toe, perhaps as early as 500 BC. Buddhist carvings at Sanchi show such arrangements, and archaeologist John Marshall judged that relief the earliest depiction of stirrups by about five centuries.
A true stirrup needed a solid saddle tree, since without one the rider's weight creates sore pressure points on the horse's back. A coin of Quintus Labienus, minted around 39 BC while he served Parthia, shows a saddled horse with dangling objects that one scholar reads as stirrups and another as hanging cloths. A 1981 suggestion of Han-dynasty stirrups was rebutted in 1984 by Yang Hong, who noted that the horses depicted carried no saddles.
Firmer evidence comes from China and Mongolia. A funerary figurine from a Western Jin tomb near Changsha, dated 302 AD, shows a single short mounting stirrup, and a tomb near Nanjing gives the first reliable image of a full riding pair, from 322 AD. The oldest surviving pair, mulberry wood plated with gilded bronze and iron, was buried with Feng Sufu, an aristocrat of the Northern Yan state, whose death came in 415 AD. A lone iron stirrup from a Mongolian cave burial is radiocarbon dated to 243 to 405 AD. By 477 AD stirrups were widespread in China, reaching Europe through Central Eurasian nomads by the 7th or 8th century.
In battle, stirrups kept riders mounted and let them put the weight and momentum of horse and body behind a blow, particularly with a sword against infantry. Popular belief also credits them with making lances more effective, but that claim has been challenged: cataphracts had wielded lances since antiquity, and the cantled saddle may deserve the credit instead.
Source: Stirrup
