Ubayyat Ibn Thamdan at the Tahawi in Efypt, ca. 1955

Mohammad Mohammad Osman Faysal Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi sent me this beautiful photo of his grandfather Faysal on a Ubayyat Ibn Thamdan mare, taken around 1955. I like everything about this photo: the whitewashed tombs in the background, straight out of the Arabian Nights, the mud brick walls and the mud houses and the oasis, the old Shaykh on the mare, and the electric pole as a lonely testimony of creeping modernity in a scene that could otherwise have taken place a thousand years ago. And the mare of course: look at that perfect specimen of a desert mare: the full powerful croup, the walk, the carriage of the neck, and the long head so full of character. The strain above all: Faran Ibn Thamdan of the Sba’ah Bedouins was the owner of one of the three or four best strains of ‘Ubayyan Sharrak in North Arabia, a strain which produced some of the best foundation horses of the Arabian breeding program on my home country of Lebanon some fifty years ago. More about the strain of Ubayyan ibn Thamdan later, once I am done staring at this picture.    

Pain

I grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, witnessed my shared of charred bodies and bloodstains on the sidewalks, and consider myself rather immunized against violent sights, but this photo of a little one sobbing after Thursday’s suicide bombing near a school in Damascus (83 dead, including several dozen children) broke my heart, and haunts me at night since I saw it first three days ago. If hatred-filled “grownups” want to kill each other until no man is left standing, and no stone left on top of another stone, it’s their problem, but what do this little one and his dead and injured classmates have to do it with it? In the name of what was this done to this little one? Freedom? This word loses its value when such crimes are committed in its name.

Myth #1: “Hab El Reah” and “Bint El Sheik” in the pedigree of El Samraa (INS) are horses. No they are not.

Some time ago, I announced on this blog a series of blog posts on “ten myths about Straight Egyptian pedigrees”, which I contended were harder to dispel than misconceptions about other groups of Arabian horses (see here, and the ensuing discussion). I did not plan to start with this one, but a recent side discussion about El Samraa (INS) on this blog prompted me to do it. So here’s the first “myth” in this series: The 1924 Inshass Stud foundation mare “El Samraa”, entry is #13 in the “Inshass Original Herd Book“, is listed as sired by a stallion named “Hab El Reah” and out of a mare named “Bint El Sheik”. I always thought these were unusual names for horses but did not second guess the information until recently. It turns out these are not horse names at all, and the explanation is fascinating. Here’s why: In a number of hujaj (original Arabian horse certificates in the Arabic language) dating from the early to the late twentieth century, references are made to individual horses being “from Habt El Reah and Nabt (not Bint) El Sheeh”, in Arabic “min habbat al-reeh wa nabata al-sheeh”, a phrase which rhymes in Arabic. Below…

How MtDNA helped identify remains of English King Richard III

See what you could with mtDNA? Modern breeders who knowingly cheated with Arabian female lines should be scared… “Despite this, a team of enthusiasts and historians traced the likely area – and, crucially, also found a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister with whose DNA they could compare any remains recovered. Genealogical research eventually led to a Canadian woman called Joy Ibsen. She died several years ago but her son, Michael, who now works in London, provided a sample. The researchers were fortunate as, while the DNA they were looking for was in all Joy Ibsen’s offspring, it is only handed down through the female line and her only daughter has no children. The line was about to stop […]. She added: “There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig. In short, the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III.” Read the full article here, and a related article here.