A few days ago a friend asked me if I knew whether anything about the Egyptian stallion Ibn Ghalabawi and I said I didn’t. Then I consulted his pedigree on allbreedpedigree.com. Granted, this is by no means a reliable source (anybody can enter, remove or edit whatever the want), but in this case I suspect the information in there was extracted from information Sayed Marei (of Al Badeia Arabians) has provided and which was used to make a case for the acceptance of Ibn Ghalabawi’s daughter Azeema by WAHO, in 1978 I think. I did not have access to any other information anyway, except for a two liner in the last pages of Colin Pearson’s (and Kees Mol) excellent “The Arabian Horses Families of Egypt”, but there was no pedigree information in there either. Later I thought more about it, and it remembered that Ibn Ghalabawi’s recorded great grandsire Soniour (to be pronounced Senor like in the Spanish for “Sir”) was mentioned in Ali al-Barazi’s old book in Arabic as as a famous desert-horse having raced in Egypt in the 1920s or 1930s. He is mentioned alongside other famous old racehorses such as Renard Bleu and Nabras, who was later…
Gertrude Bell took this view of the rooftops of the Arabian city of Hail in march 1914. Her collection of pictures at the University of Newcastle is a treasure trove.
Now look at these Assyrian wall panels, from a palace in Nineveh, in Northern Iraq today. Note the short back, rounded croup and arched neck. And the slightly dished profile and inflated nostrils of the one on the left. We should go back to breeding horses like these.
I still taken by the realism and accuracy of the Assyrian representations of horses of distinct Arabian type on the walls of their palaces. Here is one more. Note that I am not saying “desert-bred Arabian horses” but rather “horses of distinct Arabian type”, because there is no way to tell whether these horses came from Bedouins.
Here’s an interesting and well-referenced analysis on the social transformations of Bedouin society in Jordan spanning 150 years from the middle of the XIXth society until today, from Rami Zurayk’a blog Land and People. Rami teaches at the Faculty of Agriculture of the American University of Beirut (my alma mater).
The photo in the entry below got me looking for more Assyrian wall panels representing horses of distinctly Arabian type, like the one below. Compare with this shot of the Crabbet stallion Abu Zeyd (Mesaoud x Rose Diamond).
I realize I haven’t written for two weeks and I apologize. These are busy days at work and in general, with little time left to other endeavors. I received my Khamsat magazine in the mail last week, and I have been reading it in the metro on my way to work. In it is an article by Peter Harrigan, adapted from his talk at the Al Khamsa 2009 convention in Redmond, Oregon, where Peter introduced his audience with the travels and works of Czech explorer and academic Alois Musil. The Khamsat writeup from Peter’s talk has this excerpt from Musil’s masterpiece “Manners and Customs of the Ruwalah Bedouins” (which by the way is widely recognized as the single best work of the ethnography of Bedouin tribes): “The Bedouins assert that no horses were created by Allah in Arabia. According to their tradition, they brought their first horses from the land of the settlers whom they raided”. There is increasing archaeological, epigraphic and zoological evidence that points to a domestication of the horse by settled population in an area straddling today’s nations of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, in the plains by the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros chains of mountains.…
Since this blog is not just about horses but also but the people who breed them, I am thinking of starting a new series on some of the twentieth century most influential yet most controversial horsemen of the Middle East. It will likely include the following horsebreeders who were also noted political and social figures in their times — horsebreeding and horseracing being a privilege of this region’s elite: Henri Bey Pharaon (of El Nasser fame, among others); Ahmad Ibish (of *Exochorda fame, among others), H.H. al-Sharif Nasser bin Jamil (of *El Dhabi fame) and Dr. Iskandar Kassis. I will omit a fourth influential figure, H.H. Prince Mansour ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud for now. A fair and comprehensive treatment of these important characters will need some thorough research, on top of what I already know about them, so this is more like a medium term project. Stay tuned.
I just emerged from more than three days of power outage due a record setting snow storm that buried the Washington area under 30 inches of snow. I lost my telephone and internet connection last Friday night and did not get it back until this morning. I apologize to those of who wrote and were expecting a response during these few days, and particularly to the ladies at the Association du Cheval Arabe Bedouin (ACAB) in France. I have promised them a short article for their upcoming catalogue, which is going to press soon. So I am getting back to work on it now.
Bien que je suive très attentivement et très régulièrement les articles de ce blog merveilleux , je me rends compte avoir laissé passer de nombreuses occasions d’apporter commentaires et précisions. Je m’empresse donc de réparer cette négligence en ce début d’année 2010. Tout d’abord , je m’étonne de la perplexité qu’a suscité la petite maxime : ” Le cheval de pur-sang Arabe (asil) est le cheval de l’homme, le cheval de course est le cheval du diable “. Robert Mauvy citait très souvent cette phrase; il la tenait , comme je l’ai dit, des Rouallah . Jamais je ne me permettrais de parler au nom de ceux-ci- seul Pure Man me paraît habilité à le faire ici- mais dans l’esprit de Robert l’enseignement en était très clair: L’emploi des chevaux asils et, pire encore, leur selection par les courses plates à l’européenne est un non sens tel qu’il confine à la monstruosité… C’est dévoyer la race voire avilir le cheval . Je suis en mesure d’apporter commentaires et exemples , d’ailleurs connus de tous, par la suite. Si ces épreuves sous poids ultra-léger, sur de très courtes distances et sur le velours du “turf”sont celles du pur-sang anglais , il n’en est…