“Unearthed: 1,900-Year-Old Roman Horse Cemetery Reveals Ancient Military Secrets”
State Office for Monument Preservation in the Stuttgart Regional Council/ArchaeoBWAn archaeologist with one of the approximately 100 Roman horse skeletons found at the site.
That said, at least one horse was buried with a bit more care.
The Close Bond Between Roman Soldiers And Their Horses
Carole Raddato/Wikimedia CommonsA Roman charioteer and his horse, as depicted in a mosaic from the third century C.E.
As the press release notes, there was one outlier among the horses who’d been “disposed of” at the Stuttgart cemetery. One of the horses appeared to have been buried with considerable love and attention, suggesting that the animal had shared a special bond with its rider.
This horse was buried with grave goods more typically found in human graves, including two jugs and small oil lamp, which had been tucked into the crook of one of the horse’s legs.
“Here we see a particularly close bond between the owner and his horse,” Roth noted in the press release. “Even after some 1,800 years, the grief over the death of this one animal is still evident.”
Indeed, horses held an important place in Roman society for many centuries before the empire fell. An extreme example of this fact is the story, likely apocryphal, that the Roman emperor Caligula attempted to make his horse into a senator. But soldiers and others did generally treat their horses with care, though the life of a military horse in ancient Rome could be short and brutal.
Cancre/Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of an ancient Roman cavalry battle on a mausoleum in Saint-Remy-en-Provence, France.
That was true for both horses and people — in addition to the horses buried at the cemetery, archaeologists also uncovered the remains of a man, buried face down, who was seemingly an “outsider” buried with little care.
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