What seems reasonably certain is this: perhaps in the fourth century a.d. and certainly by the fifth, stirrups were invented in the Far East, by nomads in Siberia and what is now Mongolia.12 They were enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians, but took rather a long time to spread to the west. Eventually, however, the knowledge was transmitted via Persia and the Arab realms to the post-Roman Christian empires of the near east and the west, so that by the eighth century stirrups had arrived in Europe.
