Cheekpiece of a horse bridle in the form of a mythical creature

A winged sphinx, with a horned human head tramples an antelope-like creature on this magnificent horse fitting. This is one of a pair of cheekpieces for a horse; it would have beenconnected to its matching counterpart (now inthe Louvre in Paris) by a metal rod that passed through the circular hole and served as the bit. Horses were likely domesticated in Iran by the third millennium, or about 5,000 years ago. By 1600 BCE, horses drew light chariots in war and were used for hunting and racing. By around 1000 BCE, when cavalry had replaced the chariot as the main mobile force in armies, the horses of the imperial Assyrian armies (who then controlled most of the ancient Mesopotamia and parts of Egypt) came from the plains of western Iran, where they bred well. Bronze harness fittings have been found in sizeable quantities in graves from Luristan, a region of open plains intersected by the Zagros Mountains. Their dynamic forms and rich decorative repertoire is unlike any other from elsewhere in West Asia at this time. Many feature real or mythical animals and human figures, but the precise significance of the imagery is unclear. Bronzes from Luristan entered Western collections by the early 1920s as a result of extensive robberies of ancient sites by local people, before scientific excavations were undertaken at those locations and stemmed the outflow of illegally acquired objects.