This fascinating article (in Arabic) reveals that King Abd al-Aziz Aal Saud, upon founding the Kingdom of Najd, Hijaz and its dependencies (which in 1932 became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) entrusted the responsibility of representing his Kingdom before other Arab countries to members of the Agheylat corporation (see below about them). This makes a lot of sense since the Agheylat had developed deep commercial ties with many of these countries, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon, where they maintained trading offices. Sheykh Fawzan al-Sabiq, the King’s first ambassador to Egypt (in 1926), appears as the most famous of these early Agheylat diplomats, according to the article. His brother Abd al-Aziz was indeed a horse merchant established in Egypt. Other early Saudi diplomats from the Agheylat include Mansur al-Rumayh, Hamoud al-Barrak, al-Rabdi and al-‘Usaymi. The most pleasant surprise, and one that will enable us to shed further light on the history of several desert-bred Arabians imported to the USA, is the inclusion of the name of Muhammad Eid al-Rawwaf among these diplomats hailing from Agheylat families. He appears as the governor of Jeddah in the 1930s, before being appointed as the Saudi representative to Baghdad. He belonged to an influential family of Agheylat from Buraydah.…
Unpublished excerpts from Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals for the early part of the year 1889, obtained from the Wentworth Bequest at the British Library courtesy of Bill Cooke at the International Museum of the Horse include several references to a “Fahad Abdallah, the Agheyleh Sheykh”; he is identified as a merchant who supplied Prince Ahmad Pasha Kamal, Ahmed Bey Sennari and others with desert-bred Arabian horses, on at least one occasion, in 1889, when Lady Anne saw and liked some of these horses. Fahad is also the one who obtained the stallion Koheilan El Mossen for Sennari, perhaps as part of that same batch of horses in 1889. A Journal entry from that period mentions Fahad Abdallah as being from the Qassim town of Buraydah, the center of the Agheylat caravan trade network. The Agheylat were a corporation of camel, horse, sheep, ghee, cloth and food staples merchants from Central Arabia, who operated a dense and active network of caravan trading spanning Central Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq and Egypt, with hubs in Baghdad, Damascus, Kuwait, and even Bombay. They were from settled families from the Central Arabian area of Qassim, most of them being from either Buraydah or ‘Unayzah, and many tracing their roots to…