I don’t know if these two photos of the desert-bred mare *Ghalia was published before. According to Al Khamsa’s online roster, *Ghalia was a 1956 bay Hamdaniyah bred by the Sa’ud Royal Stud at Khafs Daghrah, Saudi Arabia. She was purchased in 1958 and imported to the USA in 1961 by Donald A. Holm. She was by Murjan, a Hamdani of Sa’ud and out of Falhah, a Hamdaniyah of Sa’ud. She appears to have been registered by the International Arabian Horse Registry of North America Stud Book (Vol. 1), rather than the AHA. Pictured here in old age, but still looks like a nice mare, noble, and dry, with an intelligent and sweet look in her eyes, reminiscent of the best desert-bred mares I saw in Syria in the 1990s.
The handsome Dahman stallion Ibn Mahrouf, bred by the Babson Farm stood for breeding at the Sheets in the 1980s, when this picture was taken.
Not sure I published this one before. It’s from the collection of Billy Sheets, which he left me.
This blog article quotes the famous and very funny exchange between Lawrence of Arabia and his proofreaders during the process of preparing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom for publication in 1926:
The other day Moira Walker pointed me to the book “A trip to Baghdad: With an Appendix on the Arab Horse” written in 1908 by an Indian senior official, Nawab Hamid Yar Jung. He traveled with his father, Colonel Nawab Afsur-ul-Mulk, and another man, Mahboob Ali Beg, to Baghdad in March 1907, and its vicinity, in search for Arabian horses. The following is the account of his purchase of a chestnut stallion, Faleh: “My father had seen almost all the horses in Baghdad and had a great desire to purchase a chestnutof the Nejd breed; but the owner of the horse, who was a wealthy Arab, absolutely refused to part withit, saying: “You can take any horse you like from this herd, but I cannot allow any of the SaglaviJadrania breed to go out of the land, which breed is especially brought up in our clan, and the rest ofthe Arabs have not got this kind.” When my father saw that nothing could persuade the Arab to give up the horse, he could do no better than ask Huzrut Syed Mahamood Effendi (son of Huzrut Nakeeb-ul-Ashraf), who is the religious Preceptor of all the Arab tribes and is held in…