The Land of Good Horses

Summary of a lecture given to the Iran Society and the Royal Society for Asian Affairs

January 22, 2025

It is great to see here tonight so many familiar faces, but it’s humbling to realize that many of you are real experts in horses and in Iran. That makes you a great audience to consider the question I want to explore tonight: Iran being a land of good horses, has that been a good thing or a bad thing historically?

Before we go into this, let me say something about how I came to write my new book, Raiders, Rulers, and Traders. Initially I had been struck with the cultural similarities between China, India and Iran, the three great civilizations of ancient times, and I came to realize that some of this similarity originated from the huge role horses played in the histories of these countries. As I delved further into the matter, however, I learned that Iran’s relationship to the horse was very different from those of India and China. We’ll see some of those differences surface in the course of this talk.

The first thing we learn about Iran, is that it is a land of good horses. In his monumental cuneiform inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, King Darius I (550-486) writes, “This country, Persia, which Ahuramazda gave to me is a good country, full of good horses [iyam dahyâuš Pârsa tyâm manâ Auramazdâ frâbara hyâ naibâ uvaspâ, https://www.livius.org/sources/content/achaemenid-royal-inscriptions/dnb/.

The Darius inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam: “A land of good horses”

The king’s boast is corroborated by the Greeks: Herodotus describes the Nissean horses and their hoofbeats like thunderclaps. Xenophon, who led th Athenian cavalry, praises the equestrian prowess of Cyrus the younger (408-401). He must have had equine envy since Cyrus’ cavalry numbered in the tens of thousands, while Athens had only 600 troopers.

The Greeks speak of many breeds. These breeds fascinated Iranians from centuries ago. Here is a manuscript of a hippology manual, a fârsnameh, from the Khalili collection. As far back as the time of the King of Kings, different breeds were bred, like the Nissaean, and different colours reflected distinct lineages. The ancient Persians knew the adage, “Horses for courses,” reflecting the vast and varied ecosystems of the country. Modern Iran is 7 times bigger than the UK with many types of desertic, mountainous, and semi-tropical. These environments all provided plenty of pastures.

What do we notice in this painting, from a XVth century Bukharan artist? It’s spring in the steppe, the dasht, where succulent flowers make the world look like one big Persian carpet. It shows the excellent conditions for horses in Iran, outdoor grazing, no need for fodder, no stabling. Horses raised outdoors don’t develop psychological problems. They grow up more resilient, stronger, and more aggressive in war. Iran enjoys conditions like this in Azerbaijan, Media (Kurdistan) or Shiraz/Fars. This is from Sadi’s Bustan manuscript in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA, “Darius III and his herder”.

Sa’di’s Bustan MS Fogg Museum, by a Bukharan artist, Darius visits his horse herds

Let’s take a deeper look at the climate of Iran, and especially in comparison to neighboring countries.

Here is a map of Eurasia’s climates:

The green zones are too hot with too much rain. Rain softens horses hooves and makes them unsuitable for long marches. There are too many weird plants growing which could give horses fatal colic. Rain leaches minerals out of the grass, so that horses cannot grow to be strong and fast. Moreover in the green zones, favorable for agriculture, there is too much competition from farmers for land. Indeed it is India and China where we find these green zones. No less an authority than Babur complains of Hindustan, which he just conquered, “there are no good horses.”

The red zones are too dry for large scale horse raising. These are the lands of the camel, raised by Bedouin in the Arabian peninsula and by the Baluch (an Iranic people) in southeast Iran, southern Afghanistan, southern Pakistan, going into the Thar desert of India.

The salmon and goldish colored-zones offer goldilocks conditions for horses, not too hot, not too cold, not too dry, not too wet. Here grows the luxuriant grass we saw in the previous illustration. These zones, too, are good for irrigation-based agriculture only, which as we will see is an important feature of Iran.

As we see in this map the Eurasian steppe abounds in such grasses, and therefore in horses. In ancient times, half of the world’s horses lived on the steppe. This was the native habitat of the horse and the cradle of horsebreeding peoples.

These peoples traditionally raided the four great settled empires, Iran, Rome, India and China. The reason for that is not that they were more violent or greedy than their settled neighbors. Since the horse population grows faster than the human one, horse breeders blessed with several years of good weather find themselves with too many horses. Pasture can become scarce. So there is a natural tendency for horse breeders to expand when they can into neighboring lands. This is what Iran’ steppe neighbors did.

Iran needed all the horse power it could muster to defend itself from invasions from these northern neighbors, despite its own good horses. These invasions have been a constant element of Iranian history, starting with the Scythians and the Huns, and ending with the Uzbegs and the Turkmen

The conflict between steppe horse breeders and the Iranians is the origin of many of the stories of the Shâhnâmeh, the Iranian national epic. Now this epic opposes the horse breeders, the “Turanians” against the agriculturalist Iranians. The Iranians have a rich tradition of dry farming based on elaborate irrigation. But the dichotomy between Turan and Iran in the epic is not very clear. The paladins of both sides fight on horseback using similar gear, they play polo together, they lasso horses. The two armies seem very similarly matched. It’s very different from the Indian or Chinese narratives about steppe invaders, who are depicted as much more alien.

One distinction the Shâhnâmeh makes is based on Zoroastrian symbolism, the black horse and white horse. This goes back to the Avesta – the ancient holy book of the Zoroastrians. The white horse symbolises Iran, the land of the pure, the truth. The black horse represents the lie. Here’s a illustration of how persistent that image is, a 19th century painting of the Qajar Shah Fath-ali defeating the enemies of Iran, in this case the Russians. How often is Fathali depicted on a white horse. So if, always, Ali abu Talib, the focus of Shiite devotion.

To keep out the steppe invaders, the Iranians did not just rely on horse power. They also build defensive walls, similar to the Roman walls in northern England and on the Rhine, and like the Great Wall of China.

These two photos are suggestive of the fate of China versus the fate of Iran. The Chinese, under various dynasties maintained the wall as a separation beween the steppe and the core lands of China all the way down to the 19th century.

The Great Wall of Gorgan, Gorgan Province, Iran

In Iran it was different. The Arabs conquered the steppe, and defended a frontier much further north, on the Amu Darya River. Over time they forgot why there had even beem a wall. They thought perhaps Alexander the Great built it to keep out Gog and Magog, the legendary forces of destruction. Increasingly they allowed Turkish horse breeders to settle inside the Caliphate as military slaves, Mamlukes. So did later Iranian rulers like the Samanids, and the Ghazavids (themselves descended from steppe Turks. Then a big change occurred.

In 1035 a Turkmen chief of the Seljuk clan, Arslan Israil, petitioned Mas’ud of Ghaznah, the Sultan of Khorasan (eastern iran) as follows:

“We number 4,000 families. If my lord were to issue a royal patent and allow us to cross the Gorgan river and settle in Khorasan, he would be relieved of worrying about us, for there would be plenty of space for us in his realm, since we are steppe people and have extensive herds of sheep. Moreover, we would provide additional manpower for his army.” This request should have set off alarm bells. But instead Mas’ud made a very bad political mistake, endorsing the first major breakthrough of purely steppe people into central Iran. They spread through his realms causing chaos

”That region became ruined, like the dishelved tressses of the fair ones, or the tearful eyes of the loved ones, as it became devastated by the pasturing of the Turkmen’s flocks,” as one contemporary historian put it.

Why was this such a big deal? Consider difference between farmers and herders. Farmers are tied to the land, dependent on irrigation and requiring protection from the central government. The horse breeding pastoralists are very different. They enjoy Mobility, and this gives them Political agency and autonomy. They can afford to ignore their chiefs, their khans. If they are unhappy they can elect a new khan and ride away as they fancy.

After the initial period of chaos, the Seljuks tried to be good rulers in the Iranian monarchical tradition, but their clansmen were unruly. Here is a Qajar painting from the Brooklyn Museum, showing Sultan Sanjar trying to protect a peasant crone from the depredations of his own entourage. In the story, told by Saadi, the sultan is a model of justice. In historical fact, his own clansmen overthrew Sanjar and he died in captivity, and Iran descended again into chaos. The Turkmen, horse breeders, despite this history of bad governance, rule Iran down to 1923. If this were not bad enough, along came more horse breeders (1219)

“As far as our horses’ hooves will carry us”, summarizes the Mongol ambition of conquest. They did not set out to conquer the world. They only wanted to conquer the world’s pastures. This made Iran, the land of good horses, an obvious target. Many Iranians remember the Mongols as the most destructive invaders fo Iran. There are several points to keep in mind:

· Much of the disorganisation of Iran had already begun under the Seljuks

· Second, the Mongols indeed entered Iran on a scale X times the Seljuks: 1 milluon vs 20,000, with 20 million heads of livestock

· Third the Mongols did try to reconstruct Iran, but it was a different Iran, because of much greater number of horse breeders. 1 out of every 3 Iranians was a nomad, converting farmland to pasture. As the European traveller William de Rubruck reported, “There used to be sizeable towns lying in the plains, but they were for the most part destroyed by the [Mongols] since the area affords very good grazing lands.

· This is the beginning of the ”steppe type” nomadism in the Zagros.

· Because Iran is such a land of good horses, the Mongols were never expelled from Iran, unlike from China (1368)

Yet Mongol and later Timurid Iran remained a wealthy and poweful country, and a great civilizational one at that. Some consider the late Mongol era as the Golden Age of Iran (the title of Fry’s 1976 work).

How could this be? Consider:

Horses themselves represented a huge source of wealth for Iran. In my book I talk about how the silk road might more accurately be called the horse road, since livestock were the biggest commodity by volume to travel across it. Unlike silk or other luxuries, this merchandize transported itself, and cost nothing as it pastures along the way.

An example of this business in Iran is provided by the Mongol Nikudari tribe. They had settled in Sistan and Herat. Where they developed a thriving business selling horses to both China and India. Their wealth gave them the status of a state within a

state. For years none of Iran’s rulers had any control over them. Then Tamerlane decided to tame them. He defeated them in battle, and then confiscated 100,000 horses from them, breaking their power forever. The remnants of the Nikudari fled into the fastness of the Hindukush mountains, where their descendants, the Mongol-looking Hazara people, live today.

Both the Mongol Yuan dynasty and their successors the Ming dynasties sought to acquire Iranian horses, which is suggestive of how famous these were at the far side of the Eurasia continent.

In fact, the grandchildren of Tamerlane sent delegation with gift horses to the Yong Le Emperor of the Ming, as a way of opening up further trade in horses with China. He received the Iranians in a pompous ceremony in the newly built Forbidden City. After inspecting the horses brought from Samarkand and Herat, he complained about their quality, and asked them next time to bring horses from Azerbaijan instead. This stung because Azerbaijan was the one part of Iran that the Timurids did not control.

I find it amazing that the emperor of China knew enough about Iranian horses to have a preference for one breed over another.

Trade in horses took place by sea as well as land. There was a high demand for horses in southern India, whose sultans and maharajas were constantly at war with those of northern India. Since the northerners controlled the flow of horses from Afghanistan and Central Asia, the southerners had to buy horses from the Persian gulf. Already in the 14th century, this was a flourishing trade, in the hands of Persian merchants.

But in the beginning of the 16th century the Portuguese muscled their way into the Indian Ocean and took over this trade. They were not content to just replace local traders. They brough technological innovations. They designed and built special boats with stalls to keep the horses protected from the rolling of the waves, and portals allowing grooms to sweep clean the horses’ manure into the sea. The improved safety and hygiene of the transportation ensured that the Portuguese cargo survived the sea journey much better The Portuguese suffered a fraction of the losses of the local traders. As a result they made fabulous returns. The vice-roy of India wrote to the king of Portugal, “His majesty should know that everyone who wishes to rule in India has need of horses. The trade returns three times, four times, five times the money invested. It is crazy (literally, locura).” When you visit Goa today and see the golden tomb of St. Francis Xavier, know that the gold was earned by the horse trade.

Now we come to the era which represents perhaps the apogee of Iranian horses. John Chardin, the Anglo-French travelers, visited the court of Shah Abbas in 1666. He wrote: “The horses of Persia are the most beautiful in the East. They are taller than the English saddle horses.” Equally, he praised Iranian equestrian prowess: “They race, placing twenty tokens on the ground one after the other, and pick them up again in the same way on the return> without slowing down the race. Some riders stand straight on their feet on the saddle, and thus make the horse run at full speed.” He describes polo and throwing the javelin. He adds, “The exercise of the bow on horseback is done by shooting backwards ata cup, placed on the end of a mast six score feet high. Even kings practice it. Shah Abbas excels in this.”

To give a full picture of the importance of horses for Shah Abbas, one must read Chardin’s description of the royal stables. These stables preceeded the hall of audience, such that ambassadors had to walk through them to reach the king. “Beside the great entrance of the Royal Palace, were twelve of the most beautiful horses in the King's stable, fixed on each side, covered with the most superb and magnificent harnesses that one could see in the world. Four harnesses were of Emeralds, two of Rubies, two of colored Stones mixed with Diamonds, two others were of enameled Gold, and two others of fine smooth Gold. Besides the harness, which was of this richness, the saddle, that is to say the front and the back, the pommel and the stirrups, were covered with precious stones affixed to the harness. These horses had large hanging tufts very low, some in raised embroidery of gold and pearls, others of very fine and very thick gold brocade, surrounded by tufts and gold cheekpieces with pearls. The horses were attached to the feet and the head with large trefoils of liver and gold, to nails of fine gold.”

One of the horses, permanently saddled and waiting, was designated for the Hidden Imam, or the Savior to come at the end of time, so that he could immediately ride out and overcome the forces of injustice. But in the end, it was not the Mahdi who came to save Iran.

Iran’s 18th century was one of turmoil. Let us remember that in the population of 6 million, as much as 25% were horse breeding pastoralists, descended from the Turks and Mongols, and also from the Kurds who had become even more pastoralist under the Mongols. This had political consequences.

When the Afghans of Qandahar revolted against the shah, and made their way towards the capital, Esfahan, the beys and khans of the pastoralist tribes took their sweet time to organise any resistance. The rebels captured and plundered Esfahan, murdering most of the royal family. Iran fell apart. It took titanic efforts on the part of Nader Khan, later Nader Shah, to mobilize the Turkmens into an army and eject the invaders from the country. These efforts cost the hollowed out state so much that Nader was hated, and later assasinated. The country returned to a tribal free for all. The wealth of Iran had been based on trade, especially trade in horses—which did not require a central government. This is what makes me think that horses were too much of a good thing for Iran.

The emergence of the Iranian tribes as we know them, also saw the emergence today's modern horse breeds. There are many stories about how this or breed is the oldest, but this is unlikely. Breeds can’t be older than the tribe, and most tribes go back to the18th century as currently constituted. As an example, the famous Akhal Teke breed was developed by the Teke Turkmen. In the 18th century the Teke tribe chose to become independent of the Shah, and so migrated into a remote area in today’s Turkmenistan. They made their living by slave raiding: swooping across the Gorgan River and kidnapping Iranians for sale in Central Asia slave markets. To accomplish this, they bred a horse that could travel across the desert for three or four days without drinking water, and to gallop off with a victim tied to its croup. Such a highly-trained, calorie-hungry horse cost much effort to breed and raise—so it only made sense if compensated by the lucrative business of slaving. Once the Russians conquered the Teke Turkmen in 1888, they repressed slaving. They were eager to take advantage of the wonderful Akhal Teke horses, and were surprised to see them decline in numbers and quality. That horse occupied a specific social and political role in the Teke tribe, and once that role ceased, the extinction threated.

Examples of some famous Iranian breeds include;

Top to bottom, Dareshuri (Qashqai), Ail Arabian, Bakhtiyari, Turcoman, Kurdish

At the end ot the 18th century one of many Turkmen clans, the Qajars, that had fought for Nader overcame rivals to reestablish the state, but in the meanwhile things have changed. The Qajars experienced a severe loss of territory and especially horse rich pastures in Azerbaijan, north of the Gurgan, and the Oasis of Herat. I wonder if this alone did not create a changed balance of power against the horse breeders and in favor of the central government. In any case the a modern state arose that was antipathetic to these horsemen.

In the 20th century the government decided to supress pastoralism and settle down the horse breeders. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, this was an economic catastrophe, reducing the contribution of pastoralism to from some 30% of GDP at the beginning of the century to 3% by the 1970s. For the first time in its history. Iran had to import meat. Since horses were expensive to raise and unnecessary in the absence of pastoralism, the famous breeds of Iran, like the Akhal Teke earlier, began to dissappear. But the surpression of horse breeders solved the political problem they posed.

In this context, two individuals stand for their efforts to preserve Iran’s equine heritage. Both were women, with American connections. Maryam Gharagozlu, born to an American mother, became responsible for liason between the government and the tribes, a thankless role in the political context of the time. She took on the cause of Iran’s Asil Arabians, trying to convince the World Arab Horse Association to recognise Iranian stock. Louise Firuz, American born, rediscovered a rare breed of poneys in the forest of the Caspian coast, and tirelessly tried to promote and protect the Turkmen horse. Both women paid for their advocacy with jail sentences, but now Iran grudgingly recognizes the importance of its equine patrimony. Growing numbers of horse enthusiasts in Iran, many of them women, are maintaining Iran as the land of good horses.

Horses for the Emperor of China