The most interesting feature of this article by Hylke Hettema on her blog is the observation that Assyrian reliefs featuring horses displayed what seems to be bead necklaces similar to those used on horses today to keep the evil eye away, such as the one on this stallion of the late Dani El Barbary’s below with her beautiful stallion Wali El Ahd “Crown Prince”. Photo taken by Gudrun Waiditschka in 2003. The reliefs also feature another necklace below it, with three tassels similar to breast collars still used today, some two thousand seven hundred years later (!) The continuity of artifacts in the Middle East is sometimes mind-numbing. Below is a similar breast collar with tassels on the desert import *Wadduda from ca. 1906, just to make the point that the modern artifacts above were not copied by someone who took a tour of the Assyrian gallery at the British Museum.
Arabian horse strains have a way of surviving and turning out in unpredictable places outside their countries of origin. When the Bahrain Royal Studs first lost their precious Kuhaylan al-Kray strain, they turned to Jenny Lees in the UK, who had received the mare Kray Mohammadia (Jellabi Alahmar Montasir x Kray Manifa) from Bahrain as a gift some years before, and was blessed with fillies from her. Now the Kray horses are back to Bahrain thanks to Jenny, who tells the story here. Today I learned from Mohammad al-Matrooshi that another branch of the same strain has actually survived in the UAE. This is awesome news. Mohammad is a passionate and knowledgeable Emirati preservation breeder, who now owns Kray Edah M171 (Jellabi Saad [by Mlolshaan Al Marshoosh M37 out of Jellabieh M6] x Kray Manifah), the 1996 bay sister of Kray Mohammedia. She was a gift of HH Shaykh Muhammad Bin Salman Aal Khalifah to a friend of his in the UAE. Her photos are below. She is so beautiful and deserty. Mohammad bred the 22 year old mare to the 1999 stallion Rabdan Kehram (Jellaby Nader x Rabda Farha) also from Bahrain (below, grey at liberty), and was blessed with…
Linda Cottle from New Zealand shared this treasure of a photo on the page of Rehan Ud Din Baber on Facebook. The photo was taken by her grandfather, a soldier from New Zealand who visited the Sheykh Obeyd Stud of Lady Anne Blunt during World War One. The photo shows Lady Anne Blunt and a mare Cecil Covey told Linda Cottle was Fasiha. History comes alive.
This colt is growing into superb young stallion. He was bred by Jenny Krieg, with help from the Doyle family and their stallion Tamaam DE, out of a mare from the single rarest lines in Al Khamsa Arabians: the blood of *Euphrates, *Al-Mashoor, and *Mirage flows through his veins. Bashir Al Dirri, 2014 Stallion Bashir Al Dirri, 2014 Stallion?????? ????? ??? ???Tamaam DE x Sarita Bint Raj Posted by Doyle Arabians on Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Kirby Drennan and Jeanne Craver shared this beautiful photo of two Craver Farms mares, the 1986 Hamdani Simri Chinoiserie CF (Dharanad x Levant), on the left, who died in the stampede that followed the 1993 Illinois River flood at Craver Farms, and the 1984 Kuhaylah Krush Minaret CF (Heir Apparent x O-Henrietta), on the right.
From Rehan Ud Din Baber’s beautiful Facebook page. From Gertrude Bell’s archives at the British Library?
Some eight years ago, Louis Bauduin wrote a wonderful article about riding the Tunisian Asil Arabians of Mrs. Bergmann in the Sahara desert. Of these were Mrs. Bergmann’s stallions Jehol Sahraoui and Marzouk. Yesterday, Severine Vesco posted this photo of Marzouk, a stout little stallion of Jiflan bloodlines, ahead of this ride.
When I first opened Volume One of the Syrian Studbook some twenty five years ago, the first thing that struck me was the very limited number of horses that traced to the Sba’ah Bedouin tribe. After all, this powerful and wealthy tribe which is part of the larget ‘Anazah confederation spent its summer quarters in the area directly east of the city of Hama in central Syria. As a result it was familiar to Western travelers and government agents who took off from Aleppo, Damascus or Beirut, in search for Bedouin Arabian horses. Another result of this geographical location was that many of the early desert-bred imports to the West and Egypt, which form the antecedents of many of today’s Arabian horses, hailed from the Sba’ah tribe. Major Roger Upton, for instance, spent some time with Sba’ah leader Shaykh Sulayman Ibn Mirshid in 1874, and bought horses like Kesia, Yataghan and Haidee from his tribesmen. Similarly, Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt visited with Beteyen Ibn Mirshid a few years later and some of their best known early desert imports were bred by the Sba’ah: Queen of Sheba, Meshura, Azrek, Pharaoh, Dajania, Hagar, etc. Some of the horses imported by Homer…
Hurrian Hymn N.6, also called the “Hymn to Nikkal” is the most ancient piece of music in the world to have reached us, dating from 3,400 years ago. Nikkal was a Canaanite goddess of fertility (of the soil and of humans). French archaeologists discovered the melody in 1955 on a clay tablet in the ancient Canaanite site of Ugarit, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (not far from my mother’s town). I was reminded of it yesterday while listening to Ibrahim Maalouf’s “Levantine Symphony N.1” (extract here).