She is growing by leaps and bounds, and has filled up. I like the dark skin around the muzzle, and the long ears, and the setting of the neck. I would like to calculate the percentage of Crabbet and Abbas Pasha blood there (Gulida, Ghadaf, Rabanna, Bint Serra, Bint Rissala, Bint Durra, Kazmeen, Nusi, etc). She certainly looks like a Crabbet filly of the old type. I always wanted a filly from the Rabanna line. Here she is.
Bev’s mare GulastrasSpirit SDA had a beautiful filly by Sierre Cheyenne four days ago. I just love these horses. So much style, such true old type. Photos by owner Bev Davison.
This post continues the series on the Nasiri book. In an earlier post, I had referred to the ten groups of horses featured in one of the sections: that from Hijaz, Najd, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, etc. They were generally classified by region, and called ansaab, which translates as “lineages”. I speculated about whether these lineages were “Arab”, since we now know that the Nasiri book featured at least one mention of “asil Arab” horses in 1333 CE. Another book written at the about the same time as the Nasiri book provides a clue. It is a book about horses, called “Kitaab al-Aqwal al-Kaafiyah wa-al-usul al-Shaafiyah fi al-Khayl“. It was written by the Rasulid king of Yemen, Ali ibn Dawud ibn Yusuf ibn Rasul, who reigned between 1322 and 1363 CE, his capital at the splendid Yemeni city of Ta’izz. Passages about a horse plague indicate the book was written some time after 1327-1328 CE. No English translation exists as far as I know. An Arabic edition from 1987 was published by the University of Qatar. I just ordered it. Meanwhile, we will have to make do with excerpts from a French translation by N. Perron, published…