Shoq is another one of Basil’s mares. I had written about her earlier, here. She is the only daughter of Mahboub Halep in Syria. Her breeder had seen Mahboub at Radwan’s stud in Aleppo prior to this importation to France, and bred her dam to him. She should have foaled by now.
The past few weeks have been fairly productive, in terms of my digging into the origins of Arabian horse strains, based on the accounts in the Arabic edition of the Abbas Pasha Manuscript. I wrote about the origins of the Dahman, Saqlawi, Hamdani, Hadban, Shuwayman, Krushan, Mimrah, and Harqan strains. I also have upcoming entries on the Wadnan and Rabdan strains. I will be pulling all these together into an article or a book chapter, while trying to identify some emerging common trends. One can already see that three groups, the Sharifs of Mecca, the tribe of Bani Lam (from Tai) and the tribe of ‘Abidah (from Qahtan), play a central role in the original configuration of modern Arabian horse strains. Whatever analysis emerges will remain incomplete without accounts of other ancient strains, such as Jilfan, Trayfi, Tuwayssan, Sa’dan and Frayjan.