A desert-bred Kuhaylah mare from the Dulaym tribe ca. 1910

Arabic language Facebook pages concerned with historical photographs of the Arab world, its populations, and its culture occasionally turn up photos of Bedouin Arabian horses. Below is one example:

The text under the photo is in Ottoman Turkish, a language I don’t read, but close enough to Arabic for me to make up that the mare was a Kuhaylah, aged 7 years old, 148 cm tall, color “coral grey” (marjan gri, if I am reading it correctly), and that she was gifted to a senior Ottoman official (perhaps the Sultan himself) by Far’un al-Yaqut, one of the leaders of the Bedouin tribe of al-Fatlah.

The Fatlah are one of the main branches of large Bedouin tribe of Dulaym, whose territory lies in the Lower Euphrates valley, in and around the Bedouin cities of Hit, Fallujah and Ramadi.

The Dulaym, themselves a branch of the larger pre-Islamic tribe of Zubayd (to which the Jubur and the Juhaysh also belong) have a reputation of bravery and fierceness in battle. Although the tribe was largely settled from early on, the leaders of the Dulaym were considered by the shaykhs of nomadic Bedouin tribes such as the Shammar, the ‘Anazah, the Dhafir, etc., as their peers. Soldiers hailing from the Dulaym made up to a third of the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. The Dulaym also paid a heavy toll to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, especially in the first and second battles of Fallujah in 2004.

I am guess that the photo of this beautiful mare is from around 1910. I am going to look up Far’un al-Yaqut, and see if I can confirm this dating.