A Machine, Not a Beast?

If the horse was not literal, what could the real thing have been? One popular idea: a siege engine.

Armies of the era built wheeled towers and battering rams, often draped in soaked animal hides so defenders could not burn them. A poet describing such a contraption, generations later, might easily turn a hide-covered war machine that breached the walls into a single giant wooden horse.

Another theory looks to the sea. Greek warships of the age sometimes carried carved horse-head prows, and the Greek word hippos means "horse."

Some scholars wonder whether "the horse" was really a horse-headed ship that slipped raiders into the harbor — though this is a guess, not a proven fact. Both ideas share one honest limit: no evidence confirms either.