The Oldest Horse Training Manual in the World: The Kikkuli Text

A Brief Introduction to the Kikkuli Text

The Kikkuli Text is a Late Bronze Age (ca. 1350 B.C.) set of instructions for training and conditioning horses. It is connected to Kikkuli, who identifies himself as a Mitannian “master horse trainer.” The text survives on clay tablets written in Hittite cuneiform and found at the Hittite capital of Ḫattuša (modern Boğazköy, Turkey). While the main language of the tablets is Hittite, the text also preserves specialized technical terms, including numbers and training vocabulary, that reflect knowledge transferred from the Mitanni and Hurrian world into the Hittite court.

One of the Kikkuli Text clay tablets

Today, readers usually encounter the Kikkuli Text as a long sequence of daily entries. Each day lists specific exercises—such as trotting, faster work, or pulling a cart—along with exact feeding amounts of barley, wheat, and hay. The text also carefully records stable management routines, including tying the horses up, muzzling them, watering them, blanketing them, warming them until they sweat, and repeatedly treating them with water. This repetition is deliberate. It is not filler or redundancy. The repeated daily structure is the training system itself. Through this structure, the text lays out a carefully planned conditioning program for chariot horses, with controlled increases in workload, regular recovery periods, and tightly managed feeding and care.

Although the text functions like a manual, it does not resemble a modern training handbook. It does not explain why certain steps are taken, define its technical terms, or justify its methods. Instead, it reads like an operational schedule: what to do, when to do it, and what to feed. Because of this, modern scholars must reconstruct the meaning of many terms and routines by studying patterns, repetition, and context rather than explicit explanations.

We recommend reading this article in its entirety before reading the Kikkuli Text, which is available in our library.

Why Parts of the Translation Remain Debated

Scholarly debate about the Kikkuli Text tends to focus on two practical issues that are important both for interpretation and for any attempt to present the training program in modern terms:

1. What the distance terms actually mean

2. What exactly is involved when the horses are “washed,” “bathed,” or “doused”

   
   

Your scanned introduction highlights both of these issues directly, and they have continued to be central topics in later research.

1) Distances: “Fields,” “Rounds,” and “Miles”

The main difficulty is that the text uses a small group of distance labels—usually translated as fields, rounds, and miles—but the original measurement system behind these terms cannot be reconstructed with certainty. Even if each term refers to something real and consistent, we still have to decide what kind of measurement it represents. It could be:

• a fixed unit of length,

• a stretch between landmarks,

• a lap around a training course, or

• a conventional workload unit, similar to a “set,” rather than a precise distance.

  
  

This uncertainty exists for several reasons. The tablets preserve technical language that is partly multilingual and tied to specialized training traditions. Scholars have long noticed Indo-Aryan loanwords and other non-Hittite terms embedded in the text. This strongly suggests that some measurements and training descriptions entered Hittite usage through foreign horse-training jargon, rather than through standard Hittite systems of measurement.

Even when translators choose clear equivalents—such as treating “rounds” as laps or “fields” as a defined distance—those choices are interpretive. The text itself rarely pauses to explain these units. It simply uses them repeatedly, as if they were already well known to the original audience.

Many translators adopt a practical approach. “Rounds” are often understood as laps around a training track or enclosed course, especially since they frequently appear alongside faster work. “Fields” are commonly treated as a practical distance segment, such as a pass between markers or a standard unit used in training descriptions. “Miles” are usually taken to mean a longer-distance unit, but not necessarily the same as a modern mile.

The debate is not about whether these interpretations are possible. The issue is that more than one reconstruction fits the patterns in the text. If “fields” represent distance segments and “rounds” represent laps, the program can be read as a sophisticated form of interval training. If, instead, these terms represent conventional workload units rather than fixed distances, the program is still structured, but its distances cannot be converted into modern measurements without a degree of guesswork.

2) Water Work: “Wash,” “Bathe,” and “Douse”

A second major issue concerns the repeated water treatments described in the text. The horses are frequently taken to water and subjected to washing, bathing, or dousing, but the language does not always clearly distinguish between these actions—and it may not have been intended to.

As your scanned introduction notes, English translations often rotate between terms such as “washed,” “bathed,” and “doused.” However, the original words may overlap in meaning. In some contexts, “douse” may suggest a more forceful or immersive treatment than “wash,” but that distinction may reflect modern English usage more than ancient practice.

This matters because different interpretations suggest different training methods. If “dousing” is understood as full immersion or forced entry into water, the regimen could involve deliberate cold-water therapy, cooling after exertion, or even conditioning horses to tolerate stress and water. If, instead, “dousing” means repeatedly pouring water over the body, the practice looks more like controlled cooling and washing in response to heat, sweating, and exertion.

The text allows for both readings. Water treatments are often linked to overheating, restlessness, sweating, and nighttime routines, which fits well with cooling and recovery practices. At the same time, the repeated trips to the river—sometimes several times in one night—could represent either immersion cycles or repeated washing and pouring.

Because the text uses a mix of technical vocabulary and borrowed terms, it is difficult to assume that each English verb corresponds neatly to a single ancient procedure. A careful and defensible way to present this issue is to say that the regimen includes repeated river-based water treatments, often connected to cooling and recovery, and that scholars disagree on whether the original terms distinguish immersion from washing, or whether modern translations create sharper distinctions than the ancient language intended.

Translation History and Why Multiple Versions Exist

The Kikkuli Text has been translated multiple times because it sits at the intersection of several fields. It involves complex language issues, combining Hittite, Hurrian, and loanwords. It also raises practical questions about ancient horse training, and it plays an important role in understanding how Mitannian expertise was adopted by the Hittite state. Scholarly literature documents early studies in the first half of the twentieth century, followed by later foundational work that clarified readings of the tablets and their technical terminology.

This combination—fragmentary preservation, specialized jargon, and practical ambiguity—helps explain why different translations can all be reasonable at the sentence level yet diverge in important ways. Translators must make choices about how to understand distances and how strongly to separate terms like “wash,” “bathe,” and “douse.” Those choices shape how the training program is understood, even though the underlying text remains the same.