Caspian

Small, fine-boned horses appear in Persian art from as early as 3,000 BCE. The trilingual seal of Darius the Great shows the king riding one so small his feet nearly touch the ground. There are more of them on the staircase frieze at Persepolis and on a gold chariot from the Oxus Treasure. Everyone assumed the type had been extinct for thousands of years.

Then it turned up again. In 1957 an Iranian aristocrat, Narcy Firouz, and his American wife, Louise Laylin Firouz, moved to Iran and began teaching riding in Tehran. They could not find small, level-headed mounts for the children they taught, went looking on the strength of rumors about little horses in remote villages of the Elburz mountains above the Caspian, and came back with the breed.

The Livestock Conservancy and academic researchers are still working out where it sits in equine history, and there is growing evidence the Caspian is one of the genetic foundations under several modern breeds.

The thing to understand as a buyer: a Caspian is proportioned like a horse, not like a pony, despite the size. They are curious and good with people and children.