Black color in some Western Arabian horse lines
The subject has come up in earlier entries, so I wanted to get a discussion going about where the black color came from in Arabian horses bloodlines in the West. In Crabbet bloodlines, it’s clearly through Queen of Sheba (and I think Mahruss and Sobha too, personally). In Egyptian bloodlines, it’s through Ibn Rabdan, but where from before that? Is is El Sennari and hence Muniet el Nefous (dark bay, says Lady Anne Blunt). In Blue Stars, it’s through *Furtha Dhellal, and perhaps *Muhaira? In Davenport bloodlines, it’s through *Jedah. Notice the connection of the color to the Hamdani Simri strain of both Muniet El Nefous and *Jedah, and maybe Sobha.
Just thinking about black in the Egyptian lines and looking at Zahir (1939 black stallion, Ibn Fayda x Zahra) as a test case, he is a grandson of Ibn Rabdan – so there’s the likely source of black on that side of his pedigree – but the first name that is duplicated in the top and bottom half of his pedigree is Rabdan El Azrak, so I would guess that black maaaay be coming through Rabdan El Azrak, and hidden by the fact that he was grey.
Interestingly, Dahman El Azrak, the sire of Rabdan El Azrak, is up pretty close in Zahir’s maternal line, as he is the sire of Zahra’s dam Negma, and in the picture of Negma as a foal with Bint Yamama, she is very dark. Hard to tell her actual colour in a black and white photo; she could be bay, as her legs do look perhaps darker than her body, but that would not stop her from carrying a single recessive allele a to pass down to Zahra and on to Zahir. On the other hand, Dahman El Azrak is found twice in the pedigree of Zahra’s sire Gamil Manial, so that’s another route for the recessive black to be handed down (assuming the El Azrak father/son pair are the conduit for black).
So El Sennari might be the source of black for Ibn Rabdan, but he can’t be the source of black for Zahra, as he isn’t found in her half of the pedigree. So where the black comes from in Dahman El Azrak’s pedigree is a mystery, whether from his dam Farida Dabbani, or his sire Jamil El Ahmar. At the moment, I am half tempted to say it must be from Jamil, as his dam is Sabha El Zarka, and I am pretty sure I have read a reference to azrak/zarka referring to the bluish grey you can see on black horses who are greying out.
At any rate, this has been a fun mental exercise, involving much speculation on my part – though there definitely needs to be a second source of black in Egyptians beyond El Sennari.
*Jedah is certainly not the only source of the black pattern in Davenports, since Hanad sired the black Chrallah, and Letan’s black daughter Murka was out of Hasiker. It is true you still get Great Hamdani in all those pedigrees though.
I think the gene is widespread in the breed, but at a low frequency. I’d be curious to see your reasoning in taking it to Mahruss and Sobha.
There are also sources of black in the old Babolna lines. O’Bajan was black, and so was 77 Aghil Aga, for example.
Looking at what I can see of the registered offspring of Mahruss, two were ‘ee’ chestnuts, and a third, a grey stallion like him, had at least one registered foal, also an ‘ee’ chestnut. This does, of course, in theory mean that he would have been ‘Ee’ for black and either ‘Aa’ or ‘AA’ for the agouti. In the AKIII entry for Mahruss’s dam Mahroussa, Mahruss’s 2nd dam (or at least tail female ancestor) is described as being “al-Faras al-Sawdah, a ‘black’ Wadnah Khursaniyah of Bandar Ibn Sa’dun.” The entry for Mahruss himself notes that “Lady Anne [J&C, 11/25/1880] describes Mahruss as a young dark grey Wadnan Khursan.”
If Mahruss brought the allele for black to the table, the evidence appears to indicates that he was was heterozygote masked by grey.
As for Sobha…
Literally all of the offspring that I can see are grey. Safra seems to have been the end of the line, same for Antar and Sherif, while Selma and Siwa are unhelpful as far as eyeballing their progeny goes because both are full sisters sired by the bay stallion Ahmar. But Seyal is the indicator here – a grey stallion sired by Mesaoud (a horse as red as they come), with several bay offspring, namely the bay stallion *Berk and the bay mares Simrieh and *Butheyna. Out of these three, the only surviving progeny come from *Berk, through his sons Ribal (a chestnut) and Hamran (a bay). It is possible that black has proliferated through Hamran, as while his daughter Zahra was a chestnut, his grey daughter Helwa has had lots of bay and black descendants, and is tied with the genetics of Nazeer.
So, maybe? Ahaha.
The website has turned fickle again and won’t let me edit my comment above, but to amend – it’s not really a maybe – she certainly carried an allele for black, though whether it was homozygous or not is unclear. Likwise, it’s hard to say whether she carried the agouti or not – Mesaoud wouldn’t have manifested gene expression for agouti as a chestnut.
I don’t see any evidence for Mahruss to have been Ee from what you present.
I don’t find a foal color for Seyal in my notes, but his siring bay offspring from Ahmar daughters (as all three of those were) is not evidence he had an E allele; Ahmar appears to have been EE.
Incidentally Simrieh and *Butheyna do both have widespread descent, as dam of *Selmnab and second dam of Bazrah.
I think I made the same leap for Ibn Rabdan and assumed that you are you referring to the 1917 RAS stallion. He’s described as a liver chestnut, and is a chestnut in the AK database – which means that even if Rabdan El Azrak carried the dominant extension, he didn’t pass it on to Ibn Rabdan. This is actually a super really neat incidence, though, because like Kate pointed out, his grandson Zahir is black, which means that while Ibn Rabdan didn’t have a black extension to pass on, he might well have passed on the other vital half of the equation to his son Ibn Fayda – a copy for a recessive agouti. But on the same token, it’s also possible that Zahir’s dam, the bay Fayda, was the responsible party in passing on not only the dominant black extension, but also the recessive agouti. Looking at Fayda’s pedigree further, her sire Jamil was red, which means that the ‘E_ A_’ came from the damline, with Ghazieh, a bay mare. It also being gets a little hairy after that, though: while two of the four grandparents of the mare are red (Bint Nura and Aziz), the other two are grey (Sottam and Hora) – and virtually all of the known ancestors and other progeny of these grey horses (that I can see, anyhow) are grey or of unknown color. HOWEVER – while Zobeyni has one bay offspring, this is out of the grey Nura el Kebera, which is also inconclusive.
Michael
re: Mahruss and Ee – that’s why I intended to convey was that, if the theory that Mahruss brought a dominant extension to the table with him, it must have been Ee, because he sired chestnuts, meaning he had at least one copy of the recessive red to pass on.
re: Seyal and E_ – yes, exactly. It’s entirely too ambiguous, and even if he did have a dominant extension to pass on in those cases, it’s too wrapped up with the Queen of Sheba source. That said – I’m still curious to hear what Edouard’s reasoning is. I’m sure he wouldn’t bring it up without having research to back it up.
re: Simrieh and *Butheyna – really? That’s great news! The AK database incates that Simrieh’s line ended with horses born in the 30s, 40s, and 60s, and *Butheyna’s line with horses born in 1910-1920. I suppose I didn’t make it clear enough that I meant bloodlines that are still felt today – oops.
This being unable to edit my posts is getting tiresome, sorry for the clutter!! I’m just going to leave them all as is, but my hot take on it all is that I wish gene testing for this was available back then, because otherwise it’s an elaborate guessing game with too many missing pieces.
Any idea why comments aren’t updating in the right-hand column?
I have not figured out your criteria for when to use “red” vs “chestnut.” But without DNA typing it’s not possible to tell the A-locus genotype of an ee horse, because all the A locus does is specify the distribution of black hair pigment.
The E and the two a’s required for the black coat need not travel together in the pedigree; they can come from three different ancestors (as long as one _parent_ has an E and each has at least one a).
With regard to *Selmnab and Bazrah, I was thinking of the breed at large, not the AK roster.
Red and Chestnut are interchangeable for me. I’ve mostly gotten into the habit of using red, though, since there are all kinds of variations of terms: chestnut, sorrel, liver chestnut, etc. There are horses who have the red gene but look black, but often aren’t registered as chestnuts. And horses that are registered as brown, but are still ‘ee.’ And there are red based horses who have pinto expression that doesn’t allow them to be registered as chestnut; and so on, so forth.
And oh! Okay! That’s fair.
I take the opportunity to ask Michael a question.
I have read all the papers and books of Ann Bowling and Phillip Sponenberg about equine horse genetics.
Nowhere have I read anything about my empirical experience with the different types of chesnuts and their progenies. For example I had MUAHJID, the straight egyptian stallion that appeared recently in an article here, you can appreciate he´s was a very dark chesnut. He was the son of another dark chesnut named NASANI, and he had many dark chesnut offspring. But those same mares did not give me chesnut when I used them with stallions that were light chesnuts.
The question is whether the recessive chesnut gene may be different for dark chesnut than for light chesnut? Or already someone published something about that and I was not lucky enough to read it?
Seyal’s offspring are difficult to evaluate as far as indicating his coat color genes because all of Seyal’s progeny were out of grey mares (they were out of Reshmeh, Shieha, Bozra, Sefina, Nejiba, Jellabieh, Bukra, Selma, Siwa, and Bereyda). Seyal was also bred to the grey mares Kibla, Shohba, and Bint Helwa, and the bay Rosemary.
Comments take a day or two to update in the right hand column. On Mahruss Sr., the son of Wazir his dam or granddam if I recall was the black mare of Bandar ibn Saadun.
On Sobha, it’s purely speculative based on her probably being the sister of Muniet El Nefous. I cannot back it up further.
Moira, where do you find ee horses registered as brown? Remember it’s not the E allele that’s rare; what we’re tracking here are the sources of a.
Miguel, just to make sure I’m clear on your question: You have non-chestnut (bay or grey) mares, and have bred them to chestnut sires. The dark chestnut sired foals of his own color, while other chestnuts sired foals the colors of the mares?
I know of no new developments in coat color inheritance which would suggest dark chestnut might be dominant to other colors; it remains the case that G is dominant to g, and E to e. If anything we now understand the gene actions better, now they’re identified at the DNA level. I can only suggest your results are a statistical accident: the dams transmitted the g or e allele to the foals by Muahjid, and their G or E to the ones by the other sires. If you flip a coin a large number of times, it’s still possible to get a run of all heads or all tails, for a while.
Edouard, then you’re saying you could see how Mahruss or Sobha might have a pedigree source for an a allele–not that you see any indications they’ve transmitted one? I think if there were several sources of a at Crabbet, then there would have been a few black horses at the period when they were producing a number of bay foals.
Michael – the AQHA mixes this up sometimes, going based off phenotype and foal colors rather than genotype. There are a fair share of horses registered as ‘brown’ with the AQHA that are actually red, especially because sometimes the black points aren’t as distinct as they are for bay (ie the points are brown instead of black). I think it also gets confusing for people because there can be such a wide range of variation in colors, and a lot of them are virtually indistinguishable if you don’t test (ie very dark red horses and black horses, or black vs smoky black.) I’d have to double check this, but I think there’s currently no way to differentiate between brown and bay, genetically. Colors be crazy!
re: the ‘a’ allele, I’m kinda wondering about this, and maybe bringing the subject of black and its appearance back to a full circle with the earliest parts of the Crabbet breeding program, where they had a fair number of grey horses. Basilisk and Jerboa, for example, did breed on in asil form; Sherifa was also a grey, as was Francolin, and though I’m not sure if she was actually utilized in Arabian breeding or not, Zefifa was also grey. Several other horses brought in during subsequent imports were also grey. Wondering again if the ‘a’ allele tended to get passed on with grey. I’ve been mulling over this all day, actually, as earlier when I was looking at Seyal offspring, I noticed that Hamran’s grey daughter Helwa ended up getting mixed with Nazeer genes, and it turns out that Nazeer, as far as the Al Khamsa database is concerned, produced only a single black foal out of his many offspring: the black *Bint El Bataa out of the bay El Bataa. I am noting that El Bataa has several crosses to the earlier-mentioned Rabdan El Azrak on both the top and the bottom of her pedigree, including a grey sire line.
Still stuck on Nazeer, since he’s a) ubiquitous in SE pedigrees now and b) has sired not one *Bint el Bataa, but two other black foals: Ibn Bukra (ex Bukra) and Ibn Fayza II (ex Fayza II).
Here is a link to a photo of all of the common ancestors.
I hope it’s relatively straight forward, but I ended up getting research tunnel vision and it’s nearly 3:30am as of posting this.
The big takeaway for this is:
1) Rabdan El Azrak (Dahman El Azrak x Dahma) is a very likely candidate for aiding in disseminating the necessary genetics for a black phenotype.
2) Saklawi I is also a likely candidate – all four horses whose pedigrees were sampled contained a cross to his son Saklawi II, and they all contained one or maybe two crosses to El Halabi (ex Halabia): Nazeer through Bint Hadba El Saghira (ex Hadba); El Bataa 2x through Bint Obeya (ex Obeya); Bukra through Bint Obeya; and Fayza II through Bint Obeya.
3) From what I can see, with the exception of Freiha (ex Gazza) and Farida El Debban (whose dam’s identity I am unaware of at this time), El Sennari’s offspring is the result of of him being paired with other horses that have been implicated with common ancestors of all four.
– Gamila (ex Hadba) is the granddaughter of Saklawi I.
– Ibn Nadra (ex Nadra El Kebira) is the grandson of El Dahma.
– Shamma (ex Obeya) is also the granddaughter of El Dahma.
As for Freiha: Her sons Faris and Ibn Halabi were both sired by common ancestor element El Halabi, while Bark was sired by Mashkour, who grandsires are both Saklawi I and Dahman El Azrak.
4) It is also noteworthy that all four horses trace exactly once to the stallion Kazmeen fairly close up in their pedigrees: he’s the grandsire of Nazeer and Bukra, the great grandsire of El Bataa, and the furthest back in Fayza II’s pedigree as her great great grandsire. You can see a lot of bay horses in his pedigree, so he definitely passed on the dominant extension of the black base color through his bay ancestors: Queen of Sheba, Hadban, Dajania, and it looks like Bint Azz also carried an ‘E_’ extension, which probably came from Zobeyni as he’s recorded as siring at least one bay foal and she’s double Zobeyni.
Comparing this with the earlier-mentioned Zahir, he stacks up with:
– multiple crosses to Rabdan El Azrak, and to other offspring of his sire, Dahman el Azrak
– the Hadba-linked El Sennari daughter Gamila
– the El Dahma-linked El Sennari son Ibn Nadra
– multiple crosses to Saklawi I, including the El Dahma son Saklawi II, whom all four of the horses earlier sampled also traced to
– While he does not trace to Kazmeen, he does share a lot of common ancestors with Kazmeen, he does NOT trace to Queen of Sheba; I might be tempted to implicate Zobeyni as a potential responsible party.
Obviously, this is a pretty small sample size, and it’d be worth to check against some of the non-Nazeer Egyptian black horses and their pedigrees (which I believe are encompassed by horses that trace exclusively to the Babsons, the Browns, *Tuhotmos, and Ibn Hafiza.)
Michael, yes you’re clear on what I was asking: I used my stallions with bay or grey mares, with dark chestnut stallions (Muahjid or now his son) I get dark chesnut offspring and when I use the same mares with light chestnut stallions the foals born bay or grey most of the time. The sample of this is not so small since two friends of mine have dark chesnut daughters of Muahjid who give them dark chestnut foals with their stallions independent of the color of them, but when they use them with light chesnut stallions it does not happen the same. As I said, it is only an empirical experience that must be supported by scientific theory. I have a good background in statistics because of my studies which makes it easier for me to understand genetics, so it is clear to me that each new flip coin is a new experiment without connection with the previous one, but these results caught my attention. Sure that tomorrow we will know more about the subject that today. In any case that I love that “statistical accident” since my favorite color is dark chestnut! Thans for your answer and your time!
Zefifia did produce two foals at Crabbet, Zanjabil and Zeyd.
RJ – bless you!
Both of Zefifia’s foals were by Kars.
Zanjabil, an 1883 bay, was described as “Splendidly beautiful, the handsomest of all the Kars fillies.” She ran into a tree and broke her neck in the spring of 1886.
Zanjabil’s full brother, Zeyd, was an 1885 brown colt. He was sold at the 4th Crabbet sale, July 28, 1888. Zefifia herself was also sold at the 4th Crabbet sale in 1888, but to a different buyer.
a promising but unlucky line at Crabbet, Zefifia’s.
Archer, Pearson & Covey’s book _The Crabbet Arabian Stud, Its History and Influence_ includes a comment on Zefifia that “In Lady Wentworth’s opinion, the Blunts were wrong to sell her.” It’s not clear why they did. Maybe because she had been barren for three consecutive seasons after producing Zeyd in 1885. (Barren to Proximo in 1886, barren to Rataplan in 1887, and barren again in 1888 although I don’t know to which stallion. Zefifia was covered by Azrek in 1888, the year she was sold. I don’t know whether she had an 1889 foal.)
It was suggested that there is a possibility the Doyles might contain the _a agouti. Have the Doyles been DNA tested for this, yet? I know their closed population means that every one of their horses is a chestnut and will test ee, but…? It would be interesting to know, if only at the academic level.
I’m casually slipping into this older post to bring up a horse that someone shared with me last night. The stallion ZEROUD, who was apparently very black. He wasn’t a pure Crabbet, but 7/8 with one cross to the grey stallion Magistrate, who was exported to Australia from India. ABP PEDIGREE
While Magistrate (who I am hoping to dig some more info up on) is an outlier, it does apparently mean that Raseel (Nureddin II x Rafina) had to have been able to pass on at least one copy of the recessive _a agouti for black to have been possible.