Canter culture - FT.com The British Museum marks the Diamond Jubilee with an exhibition on the equine contribution to human civilisations "Flying Childers with a groom" (mid-18th century) by James Seymour Queen Elizabeth II has studied hard in the art of neutrality but has never found it possible to conceal her delight in horses. She would throw herself in on the side of the Centaurs against the Lapiths any day, and in the fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, she'd be solid for the Houyhnhnms. So The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot, an exhibition about the creature's cultural significance, is a natural way for the British Museum to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. Since it is difficult to exaggerate the equine contribution to human culture, this is a story that might be told in a bewildering number of ways. It also goes a fair way back. A couple of feral horses, curvaceous and delightfully spotted, appeared as art objects 25,000 years ago on the walls of the Lascaux caves, with the imprints of human hands hovering spectrally above them on the rock wall. Gold model chariot from 5th-4th century BC Persia That hand-horse combination curiously foreshadowed the animal's later domestication - grooms are "handlers," and horsemen stress the importance of "good hands" - and it is the harnessing of the horse that the show takes as its starting point. In the first exhibits - carvings, cuneiform tablets and painted jars from the Mesopotamian region - the physical power of the horse is seen in close partnership with human power and government. This is not, at first, the horse as we know it (Equus ferus caballus), but Equus africanus asinus - the humble donkey. The museum's "Standard of Ur" is a box, whose original purpose is unknown, with elaborate inlaid decorations that show asses pulling Sumerian war chariots in the city of Ur (c2600BC). Donkey power remained crucial to Mesopotamian civilisation for at least a thousand years but it quickly gave way, as far as the elite were concerned, when the horse proper, and the arts of riding and driving it, began to drift south from Kazakhstan around 2000BC. The show then focuses more tightly on two of the thousands of equine breeds: Arab horses, and the English thoroughbreds that were bred from them into the elite modern racehorse. The museum's own collection of ancient deluxe tack - snaffle bits, rein-rings, cheek pieces and the like - shines here, along with carved reliefs showing chariot horses in harness, their heads vividly and meticulously chiselled. The sense in these early artworks and artefacts is never of the horse as a beast of burden or a form of transport but as a participant in grand ceremonies, royal hunts and warfare. Not only was the horse depicted in craft and art, its handling was itself an art: finely illustrated Arab treatises on the subject indicate its importance. In showing some of these, the exhibition continues to emphasise how the horse was an upper-class adjunct. It traces the development of the hardy Arabian breed and then the importing, around 1700, of three prime Arab stallions into England - the ancestral stud horses of all English racing thoroughbreds. Breeding and racing turned into an organised and expensive aristocratic business in the 18th century, and the horse portrait, a new and peculiarly English form of art, was spawned. Its specialist practitioners - James Seymour, Sawrey Gilpin, Francis Sartorius and, pre-eminently, George Stubbs - all have a good showing here. They treated their equine subjects in a way no European animals had been shown before - as a high-status individual, supported by jockeys, trainers and handlers who all exist on a lower social level. As English racing expanded to become a people's sport, artists began to show horses in action, and these racetrack paintings were reproduced and widely distributed as prints. Sometimes they aimed to be more than reportage. One Victorian example, of the finish of the Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park in 1886, has the head of prime minister William Gladstone as a dark moon in the sky above the grandstand, with that of his political rival Lord Salisbury playing the part of the sun emerging from its Gladstonian eclipse. At this moment, the peak of the sport's popularity, racing and public life, horses and politics, mingled together inextricably in the public mind. A Mughal album leaf showing a horse and groom Horses were associated, too, with other activities that could be equated to politics, as the big documentary painting on loan from Tate Britain, "Derby Day" by William Powell Frith, reminds us. Here the Epsom Downs crowd, portrayed with Dickensian panache, is absorbed in the tricks of jugglers and mountebanks, as the horses canter almost unnoticed down to the start. The Queen's interest has ensured that racing's royal association survives its more recent partial eclipse by other sports, and it has been further boosted in the past 30 years by the arrival of modern Arab royals in British racing. Today, the largest owners in Newmarket, generally considered the birthplace of thoroughbred horseracing, are potentates from the Middle East, and one of the leaders of these, Prince Khalid Abdullah (owner of current hero-horse, the still-unbeaten four-year-old Frankel) also leads this exhibition's sponsors. If at times the show wanders a little to one side or another of the line from Arabia to the Queen's favourite race meeting in order to accommodate his colleagues" interests, it is still a delightful and at times insightful experience. "The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot," British Museum, London, to September 30, www.britishmuseum.org