I finally located the original reference to the famous account of the gift of a really expensive desert-bred mare to al-Malik al-Nassir Muhammad Ibn Qalawun, Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Syria and Hijaz. He reigned from 1293 to 1341 CE, with two interruptions (1294-99 and 1309-10). Al-Nassir Muhammad was really fond of desert-bred horses from Arabia. He paid large sums for them and collected them in large numbers — a sort of precursor to Abbas Pasha. When he died, he left behind 4,800 of these horses in his stables, not counting the ones he had given to his Mamluks during his long rule. The account of that expensive gift occurs in pages 503 and 506 of this edition of al-suluk li-ma’rifat duwal al-muluk (free download link for those who read Arabic!), a work by Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi (1364-1442 CE). Maqrizi was one of the foremost historians and chroniclers of the Mamluk Sultanate. It is not to be found in Maqrizi’s al-mawa’izh wa al-i’tibar, as the Arabian horse website of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina says. Here is my translation of the account, under the events of the year 715 Hijri (1315-16 CE), followed by my notes: On [this year], Muhammad ibn ‘Issa, the…
Check out this excellent article about the modern Bani Lam tribe, a subset of the medieval tribe of same name. Some sections splintered, reformed, absorbed sections from other tribes, and become the modern day tribes of al-Dhafeer, al-Fudul, Aal Mughirah, and Aal Kathir. The remainder of the tribe retained its tribal name, and: Pushed out of northern Hejaz in the 9th/15th century, they moved to the lower Tigris-Euphrates region about 950/1550 (Oppenheim, II, pp. 320, 324; III, pp. 18-19). Late in the 10th/16th century they migrated to the east bank of the Tigris. They are now settled in the ‘Amarah district of eastern Iraq and the Khuzistan province of Iran. I guess they are the source of the Iranian Asils, at least in part. That would make a lot of sense, given that some of the strains of today’s Iranian Asils like Wadnan and Hamdani were originally Bani Lam strains. Some Iranian Wadnans below. You may be wondering why the focus on the Bani Lam on this blog over the past few entries. I feel I am onto something, in terms of the beginning of Arabian horse strains, and that such beginning may be connected to both the Sharifs of…