Tomorrow I will be taking my family to Europe for vacation, and I will be back in the USA on August 26th. I will also be going to Yemen from August 6 to 15th, for work. I plan to see horses there too. I took the decision not to blog while on vacation. I don’t know if I’ll stick to it. This stuff is addictive! Enjoy your summer.
Looking at Denouste’s dam we can easily understand why he looked this way at 2.This is a powerful mare, look at these shoulders and at her hidquarters, you find a lot of horses with the same head in Syria where it is called ‘arneh‘. It is not a beautiful head but does not mean at all that it is not a head of an Asil horse. The head of horses changes when they mature, my stallion ‘al Bark’ now 6 years old, did not have the same head at two. It is more refined now. As for the slooping croup nearly all my (10) Asil race horses have the same croup. A slooping croup does not mean ar all that a horse is not Asil. It depends on what horse you are looking for, if it is for racing this kind of croup is more suitable, giving more power to the hindquarters.This kind of powerful horses existed in the famous horse breeding tribes and still exist today. I will scan the photo of ”Ghazwane” by ”Krush Halba” out of “Kuhaylat al-Kharass” one of the most famous Asil racehorses in Lebanon and Syria, next to him Denouste looks like a Scottsdale winner.. As for Denouste if, according…
Some of you have emailed me privately with questions about French and North African Asil Arabians of the past and the present. Thank you for your messages. It is nice to see that there is interest in these horses. I reread the posts I have been writing on French Asil horses to refresh my memory. Most are “gloom and doom”, with words like “lost” and “last” all over the entries’ titles. The sad reality is that this grim assessment is true, and that French Asil are on the brink of extinction, despite the enormous number of desert horses imported to France and to its former North African possessions over the last two centuries. Arabian horse in France were – and are still – bred by two categories of breeders: the Government and private breeders. Since Napoleon’s time and until WWII, the French government has been importing and maintaining desert Arabian stallions in stallion depots across the country, as well as a small herd of broodmares in the stud of Pompadour. Arabian stallions and, to a lesser extent Arabian mares, were bred to English Thoroughbreds to produce Anglo-Arabs, a breed France is credited for creating and developing. A small nucleus of…
I just finished reading the first volume of “Cities of Salt”, the five-volume masterpiece of the prominent Arab novelist Abdelrahman Munif. I really recommend that you read it, if world literature is your cup of tea.. An English translation exists, by Peter Theroux, and so does a German one. There might be a French one too, published by Sindbad/Actes Sud edition, but I couldn’t find it online. Set sometimes in the 1920s or 1930s, the first volume of “Cities of Salt” tells the dramatic story of the transformation of a small village in an unnamed Arabian kindgom, following the discovery of oil by Americans. It describes the abrupt transition from tradition to modernity and its impact on the land and its inhabitants, from an Arab perscpective. Behind this thin veil of fiction, readers will no doubt recognize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the book was actually banned. Munif, who died in 2004, was well placed to write about this topic. He was born in Jordan, from an Iraqi mother, and Saudi father, the scion of a distinguished family of Agheyls, these merchant families whose caravans criss-crossed the Arabian peninsula, from Gaza and Damascus to Kuwait and from Hail to Bagdad.
Next on the list for the “Strain of the Week” series is Krush al-Baida. A celebrated strain, Krush al-Baida is only a small branch of the larger Kuhaylan al-Krush (or Kuhaylan Krushan) family. There is a lot to talk about.. Meanwhile, here is a picture of a desert-bred mare from this strain.
The series of articles on the Ma’naghi Hadraji strain – the fourth in the “train of the Week” feature – is not over yet. There is at least one more post I want to write. Yet I feel the urge to talk about something else for a change, so I thought I’d introduce you to the strain of Kuhaylan al-Dunays. Kuhaylan al-Dunays or Kuhaylan Dunaysan is now extinct in Asil Arabians in tail female, and this has been the case for about 30 years. In the late nineteenth century, the strain belonged to the Sba’ah Bedouin tribe, and stallions from that strain could be bred from [shubuw]. I don’t know where the Sba’ah got the strain from, and I don’t know who owned it within Sba’ah. All things for future research. Perhaps the most famous representative of this strain was the stallion Padishah, a chestnut Kuhaylan Dunaysan from the marbat owned by the al-Mi’rabi landlords of the northern Lebanon plain of Akkar. The al-Mir’abi were not Bedouins, but landowners of Kurdish descent, yet their stud was held in high esteem by Bedouins and townsfolk alike. The Dunaysan marbat was known as the marbat of “Dunaysat of ‘Uyun al-Ghizlan”, in reference to the village of same…
Another picture of the magnificent Tunisian Asil stallion Irmak (Aissaoui x Leila by Duc), bred by Anatole Cordonnier in Tunisia in 1959 and exported to France. I posted another picture of Irmak here. Irmak was a Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz by strain. Photo courtesy of P. H. Beillard, of the stud of Le Sureau in France.
I have added a new “poll of the week” feature to this blog. This week’s poll is about your favorite horse breeding master: Lady Anne Blunt, Carl Raswan, Homer Davenport, Abbas Pacha or Faisal Ibn Turki? Scroll down to see it, and cast your votes!
Did you know that evidence of the domestication of horses by man dated back to at least 4,300 years ago? This conclusion was reached by University of Chicago archaelogists following the discovery in 1993 of a clay figurine representing a horse at an excavation site in North Eastern Syria. The site, Tell es-Sweyhat, which is located on the Euphrates in present day Syria, was apparently a trading outpost between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.. I wonder whether the horse is an Arabian. How interesting would that be, especially that this is the same area the horse-breeding Bedouin tribes of Anazah and Shammar roamed and later settled. Of course, these tribes came from Central Arabia some 300 years ago, and so did their Arabian horses.. The New Times article also mentions Prof. Juris Zarins, who specializes in the role horses played in Middle East history, and teaches at the South West Missouri State University in Springfield. Maybe he could be invited to speak at a future Al Khamsa convention in nearby Illinois.. I wonder what the state of the research on the cradle of the Arabian horse is..
This is one of my all-time favorite Asil Arabian mares. LD Rubic (Plantagenet x Tarrla) is unique for several reasons: 1) she is a great-grand-daughter of the mare *Nufoud, a Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz mare from Abd al-Aziz Ibn Saud born in 1925 and imported to the USA in 1931 by Albert W. Harris. You cannot get any closer to the source, and what a source! A Kuhaylah from Ibn Saud! Too bad we don’t know which Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz that is. 2) She is a daughter of the fabulous stallion Plantagenet, an Asil Kuhaylan al-Hayf of the line imported to the USA by Homer Davenport in 1906. I am a big fan of the Plantagenet progeny, of which Palisades CF is another representative. Below is a picture of Plantagenet. 3) She doesn’t have any lines to the horses imported to the UK by Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Blunt horses are in the pedigrees of most Arabian horses worldwide. The late Carol Lyons called these horses “Sharp”, by opposition to “Blunt”. 4) Her line was saved from extinction by a person I have enormous respect and admiration for: the late Carol Lyons. Carol had acquired Tarrla (Tarff x Kaluga by Alcazar), Rubic’s dam, in 1979. She was the…
The Bedouin tribe of Al Murrah has been immortalized by Wilfred Thesiger‘s gripping classic “Arabian Sands” (1959). If you want to have a less romanticized account of the life of this South Arabian Bedouin tribe, then you ought to read this book, by Donald Powell Cole of the American University in Cairo. Yet Cole’s book was written in the early 1970s, and the nomadism it describes is now gone. By the way, Al Murrah was the tribe of Ibn Jallab, founder of the marbat of Kuhaylan Jallabi, now extinct in Asil form (sorry, but can’t help but rubbing it in, in light of mtDNA evidence).. [correction: the Jallabi line still exits in Asil form in Bahrain, of course]
I visited Yemen for the time in 2002 – for work. I was a panelist in a conference that brought together government officials, academics, representative of the private sector, and traditional leaders. Among the latter, I recall seeing a man surrounded by a large retinue of armed bodyguards and followers. People stepped aside when he passed by, and everyone seemed to treat him with much awe and respect. I was told his name was Naji ibn Abd al-Aziz al-Shayif, and that he was the Supreme Shaykh (tribal leader) of Bakil. Bakil is one of the two largest Yemeni tribes, with several million members (the other tribe being Hashed, to which the President of the Republic of Yemen, H.E. Ali Abdallah al-Saleh, belongs). Later in the evening, I asked whether there still were Arabian horses in Yemen, and was told that the same Naji al-Shayif owned about 20 to 30 of them, and that he’d recently given one of them to a Western ambassador as a gift. I was also told that the shaykh of the tribe of Juhannam, on the Red Sea coast of Yemen, owned some 40 to 50 Arabian horses too. That was all the information I could gather on the horses of a country that is believed…
I feel every breeder of Asil horses should read this piece, re-read it, and read it once again … then act upon it.
Clue: photo is courtesy of Jeanne Craver, but the mare is not from Craver Farms..