"The stirrup... enabled the horseman to become a better archer and swordsman."
Professor Albert Dien, historian
The oldest recorded account of a single metal mounting stirrup is a depiction found on a pottery shard uncovered from a tomb in western China belonging to the Jin Dynasty and dating to around 300 B.C.E. The stirrup was at first used primarily as a tool to assist the rider in mounting his horse.
China at that time was constantly plagued by threats of mounted warfare from its northern nomadic neighbors. Considering that the Chinese developed the harness and horse collar a thousand years before their arrival in Europe, and that they had an established expertise in metal casting, it is not surprising that stirrups appeared among China's elite mounted cavalry. Their use of a single stirrup for mounting soon evolved toward using stirrups in pairs to provide a stable foundation for riding and fighting in war.
With the arrival of stirrups, the cavalry became a dominant military instrument; they fundamentally altered the approach to mounted warfare. A pottery horse dating to 322 B.C.E. excavated from a tomb near the town of Nanjing in China's eastern Jiangsu Province is the earliest known evidence of stirrups deliberately forged and used as a pair.
Considering man's long dependence on the horse for transportation and communication, and its strategic importance in .warfare, the invention of the stirrup came relatively late in history, although circumstantial evidence points to its appearance in the Middle East as early as 850 B.C.E. Its invention preceded a huge leap forward in the communication between and migration of cultures.
