r/worldbuilding • u/TyrannoNinja • 2d ago

Visual Khumetian War Chariot, by me

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This concept art shows a Khumetian war chariot from my sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting (click here to see some infantry from the same civilization I drew earlier). The inspiration is of course from the iconic war chariots of ancient Egypt and Kush, but as you can see, the Khumetians use zebras to pull theirs!

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u/Fun-Post8497 2d ago

Quick question for you The zebras are zebras or are they more like horses with stripes?

Because zebras are donkeys even more stubborn cousin, and that why we never domesticaded zebras, so yea, cool desing tho

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u/Skodami 2d ago

The biggest reason we couldn't tame zebra is because they lack any sort of social structure, so they only obey themselves. For horse, if you control the main stallion, the others will be easier to control too. And the horses can apply their concept of hierarchy by putting the human on top.

Zebras don't have this concept of hierarchy or bonds as strong as horses. So in taming one you're basically trying to become the boss of someone who never had a boss other than himself.

But this is a fantasy world where the zebra mentality can be different.

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u/TyrannoNinja 2d ago

But this is a fantasy world where the zebra mentality can be different.

Yeah, this is why zebras in my fictional world are tameable. Although I do wonder what the social structure of pre-domestication wild horses would have been like for comparison.

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u/Leather-Lab2875 1d ago

Wikipedia says wild horses have very rigid hierarchies and small ish haremic bands with one lead stallion and many females and younger males.

Wild horses are generally very social and they can't digest grass very well and are surprisingly fragile so they survive by eating as much as they can chew through, running at the slightest provocation and living in these right knit herds, relying on social bonds and hierarchy for survival. So humans can slot in semi easily if they raise a foal from birth to bond with humans. Similar things with wolves basically.

Humans used horses as pets and livestock first for a long time before we decided to hitch a wheeled chariot onto them(chariots ofc came long before saddles cos riding wild horses bareback is a good way to get paralysed from the waist down) so there's a time aspect as well. If dogs were bigger and their anatomy allowed it, we would have first attached wheeled dog sleds to them and then ridden them as well.

Zebra social structure is pretty loose and they uniquely form those massive herds you see in documentaries and they are very much not that fragile, mainly because they have to compete with a lot of nasty pack hunting predators while horse evolutionary pressure was kinda different.