Horrea

[Plural form of Latin horreunv. ‘storehouse, granary’]. The large-scale granaries of the Roman Empire, of which classical illustration may be found at Roman Ostia. Often constructed of brick-faced concrete, and arranged around a central colonnaded court, the industrial nature of their architecture admits a few concessions. Their individual size, frequency throughout the Empire, and above all the complex civil service devoted to their administration, are all eloquent testimony to their importance. horse. Today’s horses all seem to represent one species, Equus caballus. The genus Equus also includes zebras and asses. Three races of wild horse existed until recently: the Mongolian Wild Horse (Przewalski’s Horse, E. caballus przewalski, or E. przewalski), which may still just survive, the Forest Wild Horse of Poland, which became extinct during the 18th century; and the Tarpan, which occupied the steppe of Cental Europe and southwestern Russia. During ancient cold periods (see Quaternary), horses also occupied the open vegetation which then existed in northern and western Europe. At some sites, horse bones occur in large numbers, and it is likely that they formed a major part of Palaeolithic hunters’ diet. With the end of the last glaciation, they disappeared from northwest Europe and became restricted to the temperate grassland and dry shrubland of Central Europe and Asia. Horse bones have been found at several sites in the Near East and Asia where other animals had already been domesticated, but there is no evidence that the horses themselves were domestic. The first evidence for possible manipulation of horse by man occurs in the 4th millennium bc in sites of the Tripolye culture and related cultures of the Ukraine. References to horses and artistic representations of them appear by 2000-1300 bc in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, India and China; chariots also appear at about this time.