I gleaned off this awesome photo of a Bedouin palanquin in the area of Tadmor/Palmyra in 1937, for what looks like a marriage or a ceremony of some sort. As is usually the case for these photos from “nostalgia influencer” social media accounts, there is no source for the photo.
I had been telling you about the strain of Ubayyan al-Khudr of the Bani Sakhr in earlier posts. I stumbled upon a reference to this strain, as I was doing a new translation of the hujjah (certificate of authenticity) of the Arabian stallion Marhum. This was a desert-bred horse born in 1890 and imported from the Middle East by Hernan Ayerza of Argentina in 1898. Until now I had been laboring under the assumption that the signatories of the hujjah of Marhum were all ‘Anazah tribesmen. This assumption was based on an earlier translation I had done for Al Khamsa Arabians III (2008). Upon taking a closer look, they turn out of to have been tribal leaders of the Bani Sakhr. Here is my new translation of the hujjah, followed by some commentary: In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, and prayers and peace upon the Prophet of the Envoys. After the Fatiha and prayers and peace upon our Prophet Muhammad the pride of the worlds, on the side of the bay horse Abu al-Janhan [four illegible words describing the horse] with a snip on his nose [three more illegible words], on [our] honor and good fortune and…
I ordered this book on the epic of the migration of the Bani Hilal, in one of its Tunisian versions. The author interviewed one of the last oral reciters of this grand epic, an old Tunisian herder, and translated it into French. I The epic of the Bani Hilal is the Arabs’ equivalent to Homer’s Iliad. It is based off a historical event: the mass migration of the Bedouin tribe of Bani Hilal out of Arabia and into North Africa over the course of the eleventh century CE. Of course, like any epic, it consists of several cycles, each one with its heroes, vilains, love stories, betrayals, feats of courage, etc.