Jeanne Craver gratified me today with two pictures of my own Kuhaylat al-Krush mare Mayassah Al Arab (Clarion CF x Cinnabar Myst by ASF David). Thank you Jeanne! She is now six years old, and a liver chestnut like her sire. Debbie Mackie boards her for me. She looks good and it seems Debbie has been spoiling her. I like horses built like tanks, and I like Arab horses that look like horses, not dolls. I wish Clarion CF had ten or twenty foals, not two. She is one of two remaining Al Khamsa mares to carry the blood of the three Al Khamsa foundation horses Kesia I, Kesia II and Mameluke. The other mare is Karin Floyd’s Samirahs Adlayah.
The Damkhiyyat (feminine singular Damkhiyyah, masculine singular Damkhi) are most likely a reference to Damkh, a mountainous range in Najd and its surrounding area (photo below). It lies some 300 km west of Riyadh, by Halban, on the highway from Riyadh to Mecca. Arab geographers and poets starting from the 700s CE alike made several references to the waterfalls and lush grazing pastures of this area. It was historically the territory of the tribe of Banu ‘Amru bin Kilab.
[Edited September 1, 2019] I have been enjoying reading a scanned Arabic copy of the manuscript “the Complete Guide to the Professions of Veterinary Medicine and Horse Breeding”, which Hylke Hettema recently pointed me to. This is the medieval treatise otherwise known as the “Nasiri Book” in English or Le Naceri in French. It was composed by Abu Bakr ibn Badr al-Din al-Mundhir al-Baytar (d. 1340 CE), the head veterinarian in the stud of the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt/Syria/West Arabia al-Nasir Muhammad around 1333 CE. A more recent copy of this manuscript recently went on auction at Sotheby’s. Nicolas Perron famously published a translation of this manuscript to French between 1852 and 1860. The translation was mostly done by the Egyptian scholar al-Dumyati. You can buy new French editions here, in two volumes. I don’t believe it has been translated to English yet. I found Chapter 5 of Book 1, on the “anssaab” of horses, very intriguing. “Anssaab“, the plural of “nassab“, normally means lineages. I first thought about translating it as “breeds” but I am going to stick with “lineages” for now. Perron rendered it in French as “races” (see here, page 16). Of the lineages of horses and…