Earliest in the running were the Hebrews, for about 1000 B.C. King Solomon built stables for 40,000 chariots, and as many as 12,000 cavalry. As early as 700 B.C. Armenia, being in contact with the Asiatic and Russian horse stocks, became a large horse breeding establishment, supplying remounts southward to Asia Minor, where in B.C. 560 King Croesus of Lydia had good cavalry, to Syria and Palestine, to Assyria, and to Persia down to the fourth century. But in the meantime shipping had grown in the Mediterranean, and ships of sufficient burden to carry African Bays began to supply the Greeks. From the pony chariots of the fourteenth century B.C. a steadily improving stock marked the rise of Hellas. The Achaeans of 1000 B.C. had imported Bays. The Greeks of 400 B.C. had cavalry. Then came the breeding of fine horses in Macedonia, and, after the death of Philip in B.C. 336, the mounted troops of his {139} great son Alexander swept like a whirlwind across the Eastward deserts to where the monsoon rains made India populous. By this time cavalry had replaced the chariot. At the era of the Christ a chariot was still used when a victorious general entered a city in triumph. But the use of chariotry in war was limited to remote barbaric tribes such as the British. [Sidenote: The chariot] The chariot for practical purposes was extinct before a single horse had found his way over the long dry marches leading out of the world to the remote oases of Arabia. Strabo the geographer, who at the era of our Lord made a survey of the known world, found that the horse had not yet entered Arabia. A land indeed where no water can be had except from wells was not a possible range for pastured horses, and the horse has not sufficient thirst endurance to be of much use for transport between the oases, whereas asses and camels were to be had much cheaper. [Sidenote: The Arab horse]