A number of relatively recent works concerned entirely or incidentally with early horse gear call attention to the fact that various features of this are still imperfectly understood. At the same time, new discoveries have shed new light (Anderson, 1961; Childe, 1954; Hančar, 1955; Jope, 1956; Karageorghis, 1962, 1965, 1967; Nagel, 1966; Potratz, 1966; Salonen, 1956). J. A. H. Potratz, notably, despite great familiarity with bit material, fails to recognize the functional or genetic implications of some of its details.

New dates and new finds give cause to look again at that central issue in later European prehistory — the origin of wheeled light vehicles of battle.

Recent discoveries in different parts of the Near East have led the authors to reconsider the early history of metal driving bits. These now seem to go back into the third millennium BC, which is much earlier that the evidence previously indicated. The paper also includes a brief discussion of the links -if these existed at all -with early bridle bits made of organic materials from the southern Urals-Volga area.The recent discovery at Tel Haror in the northern Negev of a copper/bronze bridle bit on an equid buried in a cultic context dating to the seventeenth century BC (MB IIB) is important in several respects ( Figure 1). 1 It is the earliest metal bit from a well-dated context, and it is the only metal bit of the second millennium BC actually to have been found in the mouth of an animal.The Haror bit belongs to a well-known type of early cast-metal bit with circular cheekpieces, often studded on the inner faces, and a single-bar mouthpiece. Finds of this bit type are widely distributed: from Tell el-Amarna in the middle Egypt, through Tell el-'Ajjul (ancient Gaza) and Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, to Tell al Haddad in eastern Iraq. There are also examples from Mycenae and Thebes in mainland Greece, and varients reportedly from eastern Turkey and Luristan in west-central Iraq. 2 Most, if not all of these bits date within the second half of the second millennium BC. 3 They are driving bits, with the emphasis on enforcing directional control from a vehicle (i.e. from a distance behind the horses' mouths) -something that is much less difficult from the

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Mrs Mary Aikm Littauer, of Syosset, Long Island, says that she has no claims to write about the yoke saddle, except that she has owned horses most of h+?r life, and ten years ago became seriously interested in the early horse, only to$nd that the chatiot was better documented than the horse, which led her to collect material on ancient harnessing in particular. Her muin asset, she says, i s a husband who was a professional cavalty o m e r in Russia just before the First World War with intimate memories of what was still 'a largely horse-powered world'. 'Perhaps you could just introduce me', metes Mrs L i t t a w , 'as "la femme dans la mwelikre de &'?'