The epitaph on the tomb of King Darius I (522-486BC) reads: ‘I was a great rider and a great hunter, for me nothing was impossible’. It is inconceivable that a ruler of a few centuries before would have wanted that inscription on his tomb, but cavalry had gained in status and even kings had started to ride. Hunting remained one of the main pleasures of the nobility, and to hunt with bow in the Iranian steppes one had to ride well; this was another source of good horsemen for the Persian cavalry.

The traditional weapon of the Iranian steppe nomads, the bow, was the main weapon of the light cavalry, while the heavy cavalry carried two or three iron-tipped javelins and a short sword. After the wars against the Greeks, in the fifth century BC, larger spears 3 m/10 ft long also came into use.

After the death of Darius II, his son Cyrus the Younger, satrap of Lydia, Phrygia, Cappadocia and commander of Persian forces in Asia Minor, disputed the right of succession of his brother Artaxerxes. In 401 BC, he marched from Sardis, with a force of 13,000 Greek mercenary infantry, 2,600 cavalry and an unknown number of Persian infantry. Artaxerxes waited for him at Cunaxa, north-east of Babylon, with 6,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. The battle was started by the Greeks, who put Artaxerxes’s left wing to flight without combat. The rest of Cyrus’s army entered the fray, and Artaxerxes’s right crumbled. Cyrus, at the head of 600 chosen horsemen, charged the remainder – 6,000 cavalry who stayed on the field.

The fierceness of the onslaught surprised the enemy and enabled Cyrus to break through at the head of a group of men and kill the commander of the enemy cavalry, Artagerses. He wounded his brother, but was himself slain by a javelin blow to the head. As his death solved the disputed succession, the battle stopped.

The Greek mercenaries were left without an employer, and their officers were treacherously killed. They were forced to retreat under constant attack from the Persian cavalry, and 6,000 of them succeeded in breaking through to the Black Sea. Known as ‘The retreat of the ten thousand’, this demonstrated the superiority of Greek infantry to Persian cavalry, and was one of reasons why Philip of Macedon (and later his son Alexander the Great) decided to wage war on Persia in 334BC.

According to the description which has come down to us from the Athenian historian Xenophon, the equipment of an extra-heavy cavalryman of Cyrus’s guard had strong Greek influences: the bronze helmet was decorated with a horsehair plume; there was a scale corselet and bronze scale leg protectors and he was armed with a Greek short sword and iron-tipped javelins. The head of the horse, which could be a Nisaean charger, was protected with a bronze plate, and its breast was covered with a bronze scale apron.

The drawing reconstructs a Persian cavalryman, as described in the text, dressed in the traditional ornate tunic.