The Caspian horse

In 1965 Louise Firouz, an American-born horsewoman living in Iran, went looking for small horses for a riding school for children in Tehran. In the villages near Amol, in the foothills between the Alborz and the Caspian shore, she found them: little horses, pony-sized but built like horses, with fine heads, slim legs and a long, easy stride, pulling carts and carrying loads. She began to collect and breed them, and the Caspian horse entered the record books as a rediscovered breed.

An ancient look

Firouz and others argued that these horses were a survival of a very old type. On a famous cylinder seal of Darius, now in the British Museum, the king hunts lions from a chariot drawn by small, elegant horses; similar small horses appear in Achaemenid carving. Whether the Caspian descends from them is still debated, and genetic studies have suggested it is an old and distinct lineage rather than settled the question. What is certain is that it is rare, and that its survival owes a great deal to one breeder's persistence through revolution and war.

The horse in the epic

The Caspian is a small chapter in a long Iranian devotion to horses, from the Kurdish and Turkmen breeds of the borderlands to the Persian Arab. The great horse of Persian literature is Rakhsh, Rostam's mount in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh (the Book of Kings), chosen from a herd because no other horse could bear the hero's weight. Rakhsh fights alongside him, and on the first of Rostam's seven labours kills a lion while his master sleeps. A Caspian could not carry Rostam. It was never meant to. It is a horse for children and carts and the muddy lanes of Mazandaran, and that modest work is what kept it alive.