Training the Horses for the Ben Hur Chariot Scene

The end of the theater showing of the 1959 version of Ben Hur featured a piece on the training of the horses in the movie. Charlton Heston learned how to drive a 4-horse chariot team quickly because e learned how to drive a two-horse team for the film The Ten Commandments.

Chariot Racing Scene from Ben Hur

Here is the famous chariot racing scene from the 1959 version of Ben Hur. Both Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd drove their own teams with very little stunt double substitution. The horses were Andalusians and Lipizzans. Contrary to urban myth, no horses or stuntmen died during the filming although Heston and Boyd accidentally drove the teams through a $100,000 camera. The filming of 1925 silent version of Ben Hur was responsible for multiple horse deaths.

The arena was based on a plan of a Roman circus in Jerusalem. Cost to build the set was $1 million; cost to film the scene was another million. This scene alone accounted for about 14 % of total film budget.

Hobby Horse as Roman Chariot Horse

The latest remake of Ben Hur premiered last year. Who can forget the chariot racing scene from the 1959 version starring Charlton Heston? And how is Pamela going to relate Ben Hur to Icelandic horses?

Dr. Deb Bennett wrote an article in Equus magazine identifying the most historically important horse breed ever as the Hobby Horse. To briefly summarize...around 1500 to 1000 BC, Phoenician traders were taking horses with the gaited gene to trade for tin in what is now Great Britain. These gaited stallions were crossed with native ponies who had the speed gene to form the foundation for what became the Hobby Horse (in appearance think Icelandic or Kerry Bog). (Certainly the Norse would have taken some hobby horses from Northern England and Scotland to Iceland to contribute to the foundation of the Icelandic horse.)

Speed plus gait was an extremely desirable combination so the Romans (circa 43 AD to 410 AD) took hobby horses back to Italy for chariot races. Horses for chariot racing were bred from stock primarily from what is now Spain, Libya (northern Africa), and other areas. The training of Roman chariot racing started at age 5 and successful horses were know to race into their 20s.

As you can see by the Roman mosaics, chariot racing horses were much smaller than the horses we see in the movies. Some mosaics even depicted portraits of individual horses and their names. You can easily compare the more compact shapes of the hobby horses types versus the lighter boned horses from Spain and Africa.

So to be more historically accurate from an appearance point, some of the charioteers in Ben

Hur movies should be driving Icelandics representing the Hobby horse; and some, shorter Andalusians. Wouldn't that be a race to see?