Secret Number 2

Hollywood Knows Nothing about Stirrups

Audio read by Tom Parks - MP3

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Both Hollywood films and television specials have been guilty of another falsity regarding the biblical periods that is so evident to anyone having studied the History of Western Civilization. They often show riders on horses which have saddles and stirrups.: There have been some great film masterpieces that Hollywood has produced about the life of Jesus or the period when the apostles lived which often show Roman soldiers riding horses with saddles on them. This is fine enough, but the saddles are often shown with stirrups to hold the feet of the riders. After all, our modern saddles have to have stirrups because Hollywood directors do not want their members to the cast falling off their horses. But Hollywood is wrong again. Stirrups on saddles were not invented earlier than the mid-fifth century after Christ (and some evidence suggests their invention was two centuries later).