Did the Potohar Plateau always produce more horses than combined Rajputana,Kathiawar,Mewar regions?

[Juggernaut_Flat_Plane_V8]

It seems to me that Potohar did produce more...Potohar was the famous staging area of the Hepthalites during the invasion of Gupta empire which lay right across on the Eastern Bank of Chenab

and This might finally explain the disintegration of the North Indian Kingdoms after the fall of the native Hindu Shahi kingdom(though with a 200 year interlude)

Also I am of the opinion that horsebreeding in Islamic World hit a higher gear after the First Crusade of the late 11th century..Islamic world may have only known lighter Turkish breeds at that point in history

Arrival of Big Heavyset Vikings(converted) in full armour would most certainly have necessitated heavier Horses........This might have spread over the Islamic world over the next 100 years

Remember converted Vikings like Rollo were so big that no contemporary horses could carry him..This might have been the problem of many Vikings..So they may have originated the breeding of super heavy war horses.

So eventhough Mahmud of Ghaznavi may have invaded India, he or his succesors never felt confident to conquer North India other than Western Punjab

Once Heavier cavalry became copious even in Afghanistan and Western Punjab, it was basically gameover for the North Indian polities...This is not different than when Babur gained decisive advantage over North Indian polities using Safavid gunpowder weapons

Horsebreeding like Greek Fire and gunpowder would have been considered legitimate state secrets, and eventhough the neighbouring Hindu Rajput states may not have been at war with the Ghaznavids,Ghurids during peacetime, they would certainly be seen as foes

Just ideas I am throwing around...I know the thread would eventually degenerate into an ugly sectarian battle as in every thread on PDF, but I would love to get some genuine historical infos and inputs regarding horse breeding capacity of the Potohar region before that

 

[Cash GK]

If you understand Turkish. You will know urdu has more turkish words then arabic.. turkish influence was more then arabs and Persians...it show muslims occupiers had more Turkish soldiers . My feelings you may differ

 

[SIPRA]

It seems to me that Potohar did produce more...Potohar was the famous staging area of the Hepthalites during the invasion of Gupta empire which lay right across on the Eastern Bank of Chenab

and This might finally explain the disintegration of the North Indian Kingdoms after the fall of the native Hindu Shahi kingdom(though with a 200 year interlude)

Also I am of the opinion that horsebreeding in Islamic World hit a higher gear after the First Crusade of the late 11th century..Islamic world may have only known lighter Turkish breeds..

Arrival of Big Heavyset Vikings(converted) in full armour would most certainly have necessitated heavier Horses........This might have spread over the Islamic world over the next 100 years

Remember converted Vikings like Rollo were so big that no contemporary horses could carry him..This might have been the problem of many Vikings..So they may have originated the breeding of super heavy war horses.

So eventhough Mahmud of Ghaznavi may have invaded India, he or his succesors never felt confident to conquer North India other than Western Punjab

Once Heavier cavalry became copious even in Afghanistan and Western Punjab, it was basically gameover for the North Indian polities...This is not different than when Babur gained decisive advantage over North Indian polities using Safavid gunpowder weapons

Horsebreeding like Greek Fire and gunpowder would have been considered legitimate state secrets, and eventhough the neighbouring Hindu Rajput states may not have been at war with the Ghaznavids,Ghurids during peacetime, they would certainly be seen as foes

Just ideas I am throwing around...I know the thread would eventually degenerate into an ugly sectarian battle as in every thread on PDF, but I would love to get some genuine historical infos and inputs regarding horse breeding capacity of the Potohar region before that

You, many times, come up with a topic, which is highly specialized, and, consequently, most of the posters cannot participate in the discussion.

I hardly know anything about the subject of this topic. But, I recall, that the Indian historian Romila Thapar, somewhere, related the attacks of Sultan Mehmood Ghaznavi with the trade of horses. I have forgotten the title of that article, but it should be available on internet.

 

[War Thunder]

It seems to me that Potohar did produce more...Potohar was the famous staging area of the Hepthalites during the invasion of Gupta empire which lay right across on the Eastern Bank of Chenab

and This might finally explain the disintegration of the North Indian Kingdoms after the fall of the native Hindu Shahi kingdom(though with a 200 year interlude)

Also I am of the opinion that horsebreeding in Islamic World hit a higher gear after the First Crusade of the late 11th century..Islamic world may have only known lighter Turkish breeds..

Arrival of Big Heavyset Vikings(converted) in full armour would most certainly have necessitated heavier Horses........This might have spread over the Islamic world over the next 100 years

Remember converted Vikings like Rollo were so big that no contemporary horses could carry him..This might have been the problem of many Vikings..So they may have originated the breeding of super heavy war horses.

So eventhough Mahmud of Ghaznavi may have invaded India, he or his succesors never felt confident to conquer North India other than Western Punjab

Once Heavier cavalry became copious even in Afghanistan and Western Punjab, it was basically gameover for the North Indian polities...This is not different than when Babur gained decisive advantage over North Indian polities using Safavid gunpowder weapons

Horsebreeding like Greek Fire and gunpowder would have been considered legitimate state secrets, and eventhough the neighbouring Hindu Rajput states may not have been at war with the Ghaznavids,Ghurids during peacetime, they would certainly be seen as foes

Just ideas I am throwing around...I know the thread would eventually degenerate into an ugly sectarian battle as in every thread on PDF, but I would love to get some genuine historical infos and inputs regarding horse breeding capacity of the Potohar region before that

Cavalry and Elephants were always a thing in Potowhar. Remember Porus and the damage he inflicted on the cavalry dependent Alexander?

I suspect the first time the horses might have been introduced to the area would've been through the Scythians. They were completely horse dependent and I won't consider them as light cavalry folk nor heavy but some where in the middle. And the descendents of the Scythians through the ages might have kept the tradition alive.
I see and hear most of my forefathers had horses, and most of our relatives still keep horses as a sign of pride. Even my family had a very nice horse while I was growing up and I have ridden it at times. But later, as usually, the modern era caught up and traditions got put on the back foot.
There was a certain grand grand father who was known for keeping the rarest and best species of the horses.

What I often sit and wonder at times is, why this area well know for its warriors and their resistance to outsiders would easily keep falling prey to Turks, Persian, and Afghan invaders?
Was it for their better mastery of the Horse back warfare?

As for the arabs being inluenced from the Crusaders. I don't think Arabs ever really got into usage of heavy cavalry being desert nomads in origins. Most of what really won them the wars was effective use of lighter cavalry in numbers.
But then again, we have some fine usage of heavier cavalry groups in battles like the Battle of Kerak.

Not to forget the Potowhar area has always been known for its sons of the soil. Some of the bravest martyrs from Pakistan - India wars have also been from Potowhar, like Major Aziz Bhatti, and the same folk who held Indian advances in 1965 while being terribly outnumbered and outgunned.

That raises another question though.
Do you believe all Kshatriya clans were outsiders in their origin?

 

[halupridol]

Lol,,yaa blame it on the horses.
Fact of the matter is,,sheer incompetance n cowardice is what resulted in milleniums of subjugation metted out to the "martial" people of that region.
A phattu can change his armour,sword,horse,religion,,,,,,,,but will remain a phattu none the less.

 

[Juggernaut_Flat_Plane_V8]

You, many times, come up with a topic, which is highly specialized, and, consequently, most of the posters cannot participate in the discussion.

I hardly know anything about the subject of this topic. But, I recall, that the Indian historian Romila Thapar, somewhere, related the attacks of Sultan Mehmood Ghaznavi with the trade of horses. I have forgotten the title of that article, but it should be available on internet.

Found the article...Wow She agreed on the exact same conditions I myself predicted, too bad Marxist interpretation meant that she chose a different motivation for the stoppage of horse supply

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_thapar_somnath.html

Highly highly highly indebted to you, thanks

Cavalry and Elephants were always a thing in Potowhar. Remember Porus and the damage he inflicted on the cavalry dependent Alexander?

I suspect the first time the horses might have been introduced to the area would've been through the Scythians. They were completely horse dependent and I won't consider them as light cavalry folk nor heavy but some where in the middle. And the descendents of the Scythians through the ages might have kept the tradition alive.
I see and hear most of my forefathers had horses, and most of our relatives still keep horses as a sign of pride. Even my family had a very nice horse while I was growing up and I have ridden it at times. But later, as usually, the modern era caught up and traditions got put on the back foot.
There was a certain grand grand father who was known for keeping the rarest and best species of the horses.

What I often sit and wonder at times is, why this area well know for its warriors and their resistance to outsiders would easily keep falling prey to Turks, Persian, and Afghan invaders?
Was it for their better mastery of the Horse back warfare?

As for the arabs being inluenced from the Crusaders. I don't think Arabs ever really got into usage of heavy cavalry being desert nomads in origins. Most of what really won them the wars was effective use of lighter cavalry in numbers.
But then again, we have some fine usage of heavier cavalry groups in battles like the Battle of Kerak.

Not to forget the Potowhar area has always been known for its sons of the soil. Some of the bravest martyrs from Pakistan - India wars have also been from Potowhar, like Major Aziz Bhatti, and the same folk who held Indian advances in 1965 while being terribly outnumbered and outgunned.

That raises another question though.
Do you believe all Kshatriya clans were outsiders in their origin?

I believe they are all mixed from three main sources .----->Aryans (as well as later Scythians and Central Asians), Western Asia Farmers, Ancestral South Indians

The Aryan component tend to be more or less same till Bihar among the upper castes...from around 28 percent in Pashtuns in Kabul to around 25 percent in Bhumihar Brahmins in Bihar

What really changes is the dosage of ASI component which becomes higher as you go into India, which suggests a higher population density of previously occuring ASI deep in the subcontinent

http://rpubs.com/anupampom/indusinter
http://rpubs.com/anupampom/steppeinter
http://rpubs.com/anupampom/aasi


The baove maps are data collated from the latest Reich harvard study for South Asian genetics

But even if there have been outside pulses, the culture of the subcontinent was developed in-situ

The Bharata Clan that sponsored the Rig Veda had it's home in Himachal and the home land of the various warring and allied Aryan tribes stretched from present Western UP to eastern rims of Afghanistan like Kabul...any place for east or west are regarded as known only to later Rig Vedic people (Rig veda being composed over around 600 years from 1700 BCE to 1100 BCE)...Even if the Aryans came from outside, by the time they composed the Vedas any memories of being outsider to the land was thoroughly lost...I am of the opinion Rig Veda and the extensive religious practices around it were developed a couple of hundred years after they entered Punjab and the Yamuna Sutlej stretch ....When they were entering the subcontinent, their religion may have been a bit simpler more akin to those of the Kalash than the complex Yajnas further east

This map by Schwartzberg gives the definitive rundown regarding the various Aryan tribes and homes of the Aryans during the composition of the Rig Veda

https://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/schwartzberg/fullscreen.html?object=050

Every place West of Kabul would have firmly been in the grip of zoroastrianism or pre-zoroastrian Iranian religion..They would also much more readily available ephedra dystica or haoma/soma....with the Vedics either procuring them from Kashmir or through trade from Ancient Iranians


Of course there were later Achaemenids, Indo-Greeks,Indo-Parthians,Indi-Scythians,Kushanas,Indo-Sassanids,Hepthalites coming into the region...but they never left any long lasting cultural legacy..except the Scythians transforming themselves into some Jatt clans and the hepthalites into some Rajput clans...It is these Rajput clans who would play a significant role in the military history of the the North west portion of the subcontinent well after the Turkic invasions...that the Gakhar tribe assasinated Ghori may have inspired the author of Prithvirajraso to pen a fictional account (self-admitted) of a blind Prithviraj finally killing Ghori

Certainly the Chauhans would have felt some kinship to the son-of-the-soil fellow Rajputs


The Aryan pulse into the subcontinent left the lasting legacy of the Vedas

The Turkic pulse into the subcontinent left the lasting legacy of Islam..(prior to that Islam was confined to Sindh and lower Punjab for about 480 years)

Lol,,yaa blame it on the horses.
Fact of the matter is,,sheer incompetance n cowardice is what resulted in milleniums of subjugation metted out to the "martial" people of that region.
A phattu can change his armour,sword,horse,religion,,,,,,,,but will remain a phattu none the less.

The Hindu Shahis had their core troops from that region------>They resisted the full blown wrath of the Turks for 150 years...were n't exactly Phattus...Had the same honour based culture as the Rajputana Rajputs to the East..Anandapala (actually Jayapala) jumped into the fire after losing the Battle of Peshawar to Ghazni. A Phattu would have become a vassal...History needs to be seen on its own term during each period...Even 200 years later the Gakhar clan was fiercely resisting the Turks, resulting in the assasination of the famed Ghori...as great as the region of potohar was, it was just too small to face the combined Turkic might of Central Asia...but still they immortalized themselves...It would take a much longer struggle to match Central Asian cavalry tactics which eventually happened

 

[SIPRA]

Found the article...Wow She agreed on the exact same conditions I myself predicted, too bad Marxist interpretation meant that she chose a different motivation for the stoppage of horse supply

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_thapar_somnath.html

Highly highly highly indebted to you, thanks

Welcome and thanks for the thanks. I would also read this article, once again.

If you are interested in knowing certain metaphysical, spiritual and textual links, between various ancient Iranian religions and Hinduism, you should read, if you haven't already, an iconic book, entitled "Dabastan e Mazahib", which was written by an Indian Parsi (possibly with name of Mobid Shah, and born in Patna), in about 1650, and which documents all the religions of India, in an impartial manner. This is one of the most important text on religious history of medieval India, in my opinion.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Cavalry and Elephants were always a thing in Potowhar. Remember Porus and the damage he inflicted on the cavalry dependent Alexander?

I suspect the first time the horses might have been introduced to the area would've been through the Scythians. They were completely horse dependent and I won't consider them as light cavalry folk nor heavy but some where in the middle. And the descendents of the Scythians through the ages might have kept the tradition alive.
I see and hear most of my forefathers had horses, and most of our relatives still keep horses as a sign of pride. Even my family had a very nice horse while I was growing up and I have ridden it at times. But later, as usually, the modern era caught up and traditions got put on the back foot.
There was a certain grand grand father who was known for keeping the rarest and best species of the horses.

What I often sit and wonder at times is, why this area well know for its warriors and their resistance to outsiders would easily keep falling prey to Turks, Persian, and Afghan invaders?
Was it for their better mastery of the Horse back warfare?

As for the arabs being inluenced from the Crusaders. I don't think Arabs ever really got into usage of heavy cavalry being desert nomads in origins. Most of what really won them the wars was effective use of lighter cavalry in numbers.
But then again, we have some fine usage of heavier cavalry groups in battles like the Battle of Kerak.

Not to forget the Potowhar area has always been known for its sons of the soil. Some of the bravest martyrs from Pakistan - India wars have also been from Potowhar, like Major Aziz Bhatti, and the same folk who held Indian advances in 1965 while being terribly outnumbered and outgunned.

That raises another question though.
Do you believe all Kshatriya clans were outsiders in their origin?

Correct me if im wrong, but Porus wasnt from the potohar or salt range?

@Rafi. Since you are from the area please enlighten us.

 

[SIPRA]

.......Anandapala jumped into the fire after losing the Battle of Peshawar to Ghazni.

If I am not mistaken; it was Jaipala, and not Anandapala. Correct me, if I am wrong.

 

[War Thunder]

Lol,,yaa blame it on the horses.
Fact of the matter is,,sheer incompetance n cowardice is what resulted in milleniums of subjugation metted out to the "martial" people of that region.
A phattu can change his armour,sword,horse,religion,,,,,,,,but will remain a phattu none the less.

When I have no clue and I want to jump into something I can't even comprehend.

 

[Juggernaut_Flat_Plane_V8]

If you understand Turkish. You will know urdu has more turkish words then arabic.. turkish influence was more then arabs and Persians...it show muslims occupiers had more Turkish soldiers . My feelings you may differ

the Turk Pashtun rivalry that played on well into the Mughal Era has never been adequately studied..I am also of the opinion Turks formed the overwhelming majority if the Central Asian forces that brought Islam into India, and were at war with Pashtuns....Much more time has been alloted to the Turk Rajpout rivalry

If I am not mistaken; it was Jaipala, and not Anandapala. Correct me, if I am wrong.

Sorry my bad..you are correct

 

[Kambojaric]

The Indus region has always valued horses, from the ancient Kambojas down to modern day neeza bazi. Being neighbors of horse people (Central Asian hordes) I suppose the horse focus was natural. Ganges based kingdoms had jungle nations as neighbors which reduced the importance of cavalry. I mean the Mughal cavalry got bogged down and fared poorly in Bengal and especially Assam. Even the Maratha territory favored ponies over proper horses. This is my guess at least.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

the Turk Pashtun rivalry that played on well into the Mughal Era has never been adequately studied..I am also of the opinion Turks formed the overwhelming majority if the Central Asian forces that brought Islam into India, and were at war with Pashtuns....Much more time has been alloted to the Turk Rajpout rivalry



Sorry my bad..you are correct

Rajput Turk rivalry? Id like to know more bout that.

Do you mean Khiljis invasions? In that case id say he was more Pashtun than Turk and so were his troops۔

 

[War Thunder]

Correct me if im wrong, but Porus wasnt from the potohar or salt range?

@Rafi. Since you are from the area please enlighten us.

Potohar does not start nor end at the Salt range. The Salt range and adjoining areas infact contain people who are more Punjabi than Potohari, and cannot be compared to the rest of the Potohar.
Areas like Kallar Kahar and Chakwal.



P.S: Any one want to write something on King Porus.
They Keyword "Where was King Porus Born" has no search results in Google.
Write something with this as your title and you can rank on top right away.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Potohar does not start nor end at the Salt range. The Salt range and adjoining areas infact contain people who are more Punjabi than Potohari, and cannot be compared to the rest of the Potohar.
Areas like Kallar Kahar and Chakwal.



P.S: Any one want to write something on King Porus.
They Keyword "Where was King Porus Born" has no search results in Google.
Write something with this as your title and you can rank on top right away.

@Rafi village was part of Porus’s army. Infact I believe they built a monument for them.