Horse-sacrifice and kingship in the 'Secret History of the Mongols' and inIndo-European cultures

The horse-sacrifice, with Indic, Roman, Celtic, Scandinavian and Hittite ex amples, has been regarded as an important Proto-Indo-European ritual used t o inaugurate or affirm kingship. This article presents a 13th-century Mongo l analogue, and somewhat more distant Turkic analogues, that support an alt ernative view: that regnal horse-sacrifices may have an Eurasian geographic al distribution, rather than a specifically Indo-European genealogical one.