Taken for a ride
Believed extinct for a millennia, the Caspian horse was rediscovered and revived only to be forced back to the brink by Iranian bureaucracy and global recession. Lynne O'Donnell ponders the future of the tiny steed with the big heart
The chariot is pulled by two horses, which, like everything else in the picture, are dwarfed by the image of Darius. Until recently, historians believed the proportions of the scene on the seal, which dates back 2,600 years to a time when the Achaemenid Persian Empire was at its peak, were simply compliant with rules that stated in art, if not in life, nothing could overpower the image of the ruler.
Then, in the 1950s, along came Louise Firouz, an American whose family had personal and professional connections to Iran. She discovered a tiny horse in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains in the north of the country and, in doing so, changed our understanding of history.
Firouz had moved to Iran in the late 50s, after having married a Persian prince. By the time I met her, in 2004, she had lived in Iran for almost half a century. In that time, she had raised three children, rubbed shoulders with shahs, spent time in prison for being on the wrong side of a revolution - and won international recognition for rediscovering the Caspian horse, which experts and historians thought had been extinct for at least 1,000 years.
While on a trip to buy ponies for her children in 1965, Firouz found a small horse tethered on a building site near the southern shore of the Caspian Sea.
"It was absolutely perfect," she told me, almost 40 years after discovering what she later called the Caspian. "I just thought, 'How could anything be so beautiful?'"
The exquisite creature, which she bought from the builder for US$10, was so filthy that Firouz could barely make out what colour it was. But once she had taken it back to her riding school, outside Tehran, and given it a thorough brush down, the tiny chestnut began to remind her of the horses she had seen on friezes in Persepolis, the ancient Persian capital, near where she had met her husband, Narcy, and also on the Darius Seal.