This photo is from the World Digital Library “from a collection of 65 projectable lantern slides relating to the Arab Revolt of 1916?18.” DOW readers and lovers of the true Arabian horse, click on the image to enlarge it, and please spend time gazing and squinting at each horse, and look at the chest, the eye sockets, the facial bones, the knees, the fine muzzle, and try to breed for similar traits to the extent possible.
This spring my 24 year old mare Nuri Al Krush will be bred to Jamr Al Arab for a linebred foal to the great Hanad. Nuri brings the lines of the Hanad sons Tripoli and Mainad, and Jamr adds Sanad, Ibn Hanad and Ameer Ali. The photo was taken at her breeder and owner Trish Stockhecke in Ontario, Canada.
Mystic UF (Janan Abinoam x Astranah by Astrologer), 1987 Kuhaylan Hayfi of Davenport lines, was a powerhouse. Owner Aida Schreiber riding.
The strain of the Frayjan is one of the oldest Arabian horse strains. It gets an early mention by K. Niebuhr in 1772 as of the five strains of Al Khamsa, with the spelling fradsje — see the beautifully researched article of Kate McLachlan on the five Al Khamsa strains. The strain is not a Kuhaylan strain, but is self standing. It takes it names from the Frijah section of the Ruwalah tribe, to which it originally belonged. The Frijah were one of the first sections of the Ruwalah to migrate from West Central Arabia to North Arabia. In the 1970s, two stallions from this strain were listed in the first Lebanese Arabian Horse Studbook submitted to WAHO. In the early 2000s, Hazaim mentioned to me a non-Asil mare from this strain in Homs. She traced in female line to an Asil Frayjah mare. She was the daughter of the Iraqi part-bred Arabian stallion al-Zir. It would be interesting to get some DNA from this line. The strain is now extinct in asil form. Incidentally, the Frijah is the section of the Ruwalah which owned the Saqlawi strain. The Qidran (or Gidran, hence Jidran and Jadran) are one of the…
From the Arabian Horse Archives: Part of a series of 120 primarily glass slides taken by Joe Buchanan’s father, Robert Earle Buchanan, a professor of Agriculture at Iowa State University, on trips to the Middle East in 1946 and 1949. In the Comar Arabians collection of Garth and Joe Buchanan. Now held by Carolyn and Dick Hasbrook, Twinbrook Arabians, Ames, Iowa. About the chestnut stallion: notice the strong backline, the deep girth, the high withers, the straight shoulder and the long hip. You can see the big eye sockets too. I really wonder what his breeding is. In the pen behind him is another stallion, grey. Only a blurry head shows, but here too you can the protruding eye socket, the dry and delicate muzzle, the prominent bone under the eye, and the fine black skin around the eyes and muzzle. The hindquarter looks droopy but it may be the posture. About the white male donkeys: these are from the precious breed that comes from al-Hassa province of Eastern Arabia; they are taller and stouter than average donkeys, and have bigger and drier heads. A very precious breed now vanished.
These posts weere initially published on the AKHorsemen Yahoo discussion group, over several days in August 2001. There is no evidence whatsoever that Bedouins ever bred according to strain theory. This is a myth. They most certainly never did it intentionally during the 20th century and the Abbas Pasha Manuscript is here at last to tell us it did not happen in the 19th century. There are definitely many different types [of Arabian horses], distinctive and special. The greatest contribution of North American breeders of Arabians to the breed (a contribution at least equal that of the Bedouins in preserving the purity of the blood from immemorial times) is that they have emphasized and developed these types. However it is my opinion that the mistake of these breeders was to confuse strains and types. They are not to be associated. Strains are just equivalents of family names for humans. Humans transmitfamily names from father to son, in horses family names (strains) aretransmitted from mother to daughter, simply because Bedouins thought it was more convenient, for several reasons (I’ll expand on this later). You have tall humans and short humans; and you have humans from the Smith family and other from…
The information on this rare strain found only in the Kingdom of Bahrain, primarily comes from the seminal 1971 article of Judi Forbis in Arabian Horse World, later republished in her book Authentic Arabian Bloodstock. Judi visited Bahrain in March 1970, and recorded the following information about the strain, in three different parts of that article. The first reference provides background on the strain: Kuhaylah Al Adiati is another strain rarely heard of before, but deriving from the Kuhaylah family. She came from Saudi Arabia and was presented to Sheikh Hamad when he was a prince, together with a letter of presentation from the offering Sheikh of Al Ajman: “I send to you this mare which fulfills Al Adiat”. That is, to him she embodied all the swift and desirable attributes understood in the beautiful El Adiat, Sura 100 of the Koran [A translation of Verse 100 of the Qur’an follows]. What greater or more meaningful gift could he possibly have bestowed? When Sheikh Hamad saw her race and found her to be exceedingly swift, he happily declared: “Truly She is of Al Adiat.” The second reference occurs during a visit to the stud of Sakhir: “Sakhir, the abandoned palace…
The ‘Ubayyan colt Kasim was a gift from King ‘Abd al-Aziz Aal Saud to the Earl and Countess of Athlone (Queen Victoria’s granddaughter) during their visit to Arabian in 1938. I donated this photo and that of *Turfa and Faras which you saw on this blog earlier, the Arabian Horse Archives. They were a gift from Kees Mol, who had received them from someone who had received them from the Dutch Consul in Jeddah who took the pictures, as indicated on the archives’ website.
Damascus SF (Memoir UF x Neroli CF by Regency CF) is a very smooth stallion of Davenport lines, bred and owned by Aida Schreiber in New Hamsphire. Through a close cross to Bint Ralf, he has a rare line to the Davenport desert-bred import *Farha, and most probably, the last line to *Haleb in Davenports, too. I loved that crested, muscular neck.
My friend and mentor Chuck Humphreys sent me this poem by Latin American poem Pablo Neruda: HORSES From the window I saw the horses. I was in Berlin, in winter, The light was without light, the sky skyless. The air was white like a moistened leaf. From my window, I could see a deserted arena, a circle bitten out by the teeth of winter. All at once, led out by a single man, ten horses were stepping, stepping into the snow. Scarcely had they rippled into existence like flame, than they filled the whole world of my eyes, empty till now. Faultless, flaming, they stepped like ten gods on broad, clean hoofs, their manes recalling a dream of salt spray. Their rumps were globes, were oranges. Their color was amber and honey, was on fire. Their necks were towers carved from the stone of pride, and in their furious eyes, sheer energy showed itself, a prisoner inside them. And there, in the silence, at the mid-point of the day, in a dirty, disgruntled winter, the horses’ intense presence was blood, was rhythm, was the beckoning light of all being. I saw, I…
Severine Vesco took this beautiful photo of my friend Jean-Claude Rajot and his Syrian stallion Mahboub Halep, bred by Radwane Shabareq near Aleppo in 2007.