Last year, I posted a photo of the grey Ma’naqi Sbayli stallion Sultan, one of the Syrian government stallions at the stallion depot of the Veterinary Unit of the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture in 1958 (Syria’s then equivalent of the EAO). Now I am posting this photo of Sultan’s mate, the Hamdani Simri stallion Hassaan. Photo from Hazaim Alwair. Judging from these pictures and others, the Syrian government appears to have maintained of asil stallions at this time. I was told that when in the late 1950s Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser offered it the stallion Amro (Nazeer x Amara by Kheir x Zahra by Hamran II), many Syrian breeders shunned him because they felt the government stallions were better.
This is my translation of the hujjah of Mumtazah, the maternal and paternal grand-dam of the Kuhaylan Krush stallion Mokhtar, who is now in France with Chantal Chekroun and is already 27 years old. I am happy to see the number of his descendants increase every year. “I the undersigned ‘Iyadah al-Talab al-Khalaf, known as al-Qartah from the Faddaghah tribe of the Shammar al-Zawr, who now lives in the village of al-Taif, which is in the district of Tall Hamis in the province of al-Qamishli, I testify by God Most High, a testimony free from all self-interest, that the grey flea-bitten mare that is eighteen years old is Krush al-Bayda; she [i.e., her line] came to us directly from the Shaykh of the Shaykhs of the Shammar, Mayzar Abd al-Muhsin, approximately twenty years ago; her sire is Krush from the same marbat; and so are the sire of her dam, and the sire of her sire; her paternal uncles are from her maternal uncles [i.e., her sire and dam are closely related and so are their sires and dams] and no outside horse was introduced among them [i.e., the line was only bred to stallions from the same line]. And…
Adrien Deblaise just shared with me this photo of the Syrian stallion imported to France, Hussam al-Shamal (Raad x Rouba al-Shamal by Al-Abjar). He is reminicent of his sire the desert-bred (literally born under a tent) Kuhaylan al-Mossen Raad in color, size of the eye, croup, and of his maternal grandsire, the impressive Saqlawi ibn Zubayni al-Abjar (neck, ears, shoulder).
From Jenny Lees: “Here is Mlolshaan Mahrous . He is around 15 hands 1” a very pretty stallion with a slightly cheekier sense of humour. He will cover Hamdanieh Munya this summer.”
Jenny Lees kindly sent me these photos of the Bahraini stallion Tuwaisaan Tha’atha’a, which was presented by the King of Bahrain to the Queen of England. He will stand at her place along with the other stallion, a Mlolshaan.
I am now told that the two horses offered by the King of Bahrain to the Queen of England are stallions, not mares, and that the Bahrainis brought over 7 or 8 stallions which were displayed at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, partly as Bahrain was sponsoring the big FEI Endurance ride at the same venue. Each of the 7-8 stallions appear to be from a different strain. You can see amateur photos here, here and here. The one below is my favorite (URL copied and redirects to website, with credits to “AnnaMaisy25” who took the picture). He appears to be one of the two offered to the Queen.
Read the story here. Hopefully these would end with Jenny Lees of Pearl Island Stud, and be bred to the Bahraini stallions already there (thanks Jeanne Craver for the link).
I am extremely impressed with the structure and conformation of Jenny Krieg’s filly, Ubayyat al-Bahrain, one of two daughters of the twenty seven year old desert-bred Bahraini stallion Mlolshaan Hager Solomon, out of the Ubayyah mare DB Kalilah. I don’r think she is even two years old. To be honest, I have never seen such depth of girth, shortness of back, strength of musculature, and length of ear (all marks of an asil ware mare) in any Arabian horse in the USA before. She reminds of war mares I have seen in Syria including Mari a Shuwaymah Sabbah at Radwan Shabareq and Nawwarah a Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah at Abdel Mohsen al-Nassif. That’s how war mares in the desert were like. Really. Seeing this photo encouraged me to breed to this Bahraini stallion and I will do it as early as this spring, even if I would have preferred not to have to fork out 1,000 USD in breeding fees. The image below is copy of Loan Oak Photography.
This is the asil Hamdani Simri stallion AAS Najl Enan (AAS Enan x AAS Ardal Rafiqa by Ibn Taamri) bred by Edie Booth of Antique Arabians Stud for Canton, TX. A promising young stallion. He is very reminiscent of some of Lebanon’s asils of the 1940s and 1950s.
Regina and Warren from Germany wrote the other day to give me an update about their asil Arabians which are from desert bred Saudi and Bahraini lines (no Egyptian blood) by way of the US, and from the rare and precious Dahman Shahwan strain. Here is the 2009 Dahmah mare AAS Muharraq (AAS Theeb x AAS Ghazala by Ibn Taam-Rud), whose tail female is to *Savannah, a mare bred by Shaykh Salman Ibn Hamad al-Khalifah of Bahrain and imported from Bahrain to the United States of America in 1954 by K.M. Kelly. Note the striking resemblance with the mare Bahraini Bint El Bahrein of Lady Anne Blunt in Sheykh Obeyd, of same strain, marbat and same provenance (the Royal Stud of Bahrain, we need to run an mtDNA test). Striking, no, even though AAS Muharraq has not one ounce of Bint El Bahrein blood! This one is Ralihadiyyah, Muharraq’s brother. Note the shoulder. This one is his brother Gudaibiyah, Muharraq’s other brother.
Jeanne Craver just shared with some of us on the Al Khamsa board this video of the WAHO 2007 convention in Syria. Jeanne expresses it well when she writes: “It is such a bittersweet film, linking our minds to that wonderful trip and all of the spectacular photos, with the constant reminder of the disaster in Syria now….”
Here’s of one of the joys of maintaining a website like Daughters of the Wind: a few weeks Husayn al-Mansur al-Yami of Najran in Saudi Arabia sent me the following message, which I reproduce here in full: Hello Edouard, Under the” Video of the Day” section of your blog, I read something about Najran horses and especially, Khumayssan or Khameesan as we pronounce it. I would like to add what I know about the strain and wish to know more about it and the people who still preserve it. Al-Khameesah horses are bred and preserved for one and only one purpose, the war. In addition to their beauty, they are fast, strong, brave, smart, loyal, and alert. They can carry heavy weights, and run for long distances. They can stand harsh weather and geographic conditions. Their solid hooves and bones, and massive muscles enables them to perform well in the mountains and the desert. So, I guess having Al-Khameesah horse in the old days is like having a modern war vehicle today. Even though it is well known in our area and in the neighboring areas of the country of Yemen, it is not listed among the Arabian horse strains.…
Jeanne Craver sent me this photo of the black Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz stallion Jadah Sharuuq (Lifes Capade LD x Belladonna CHF by Audobon), a Sharp (no Blunt/Crabbet blood) stallion bred by Randall and Mary Sue Harris of Peoria, IL, from lines from Carol Lyons. This rare and precious stallion is just five generations removed from the 1925 desert bred Saudi mare *Nufoud, in the dam line. He combines in my opinion, the best of American asil Arabian bloodlines: the Davenports, the Saudi Arabian imports of Albert Harris, the blood of *Turfa up close, and the Egyptian lines of H.H. Prince Mohammed Ali (*Fadl and *HH … Hamida). Jeanne had already sent me a photo of his beautiful dam Belladonna CHF — click here.
One reason I enjoy keeping this blog is the unexpected encounters that I had the chance to make through it over its nearly five years of existence. One such encouter was the one with Obeyd al-‘Utaibi (“a.k.a Pure Man”) a ‘Ataiba Bedouin of Saudi citizenship who maintains the spirit of old Arabian Bedouin horse breeding — as opposed to the new Arabian horse breeding spirit largely prevailing in the Gulf today, which is not based on old Bedouin knowledge and practices and is basically just mimicking Western practices, minus the West’s knowledge (there are exceptions, of course). Another was the encounter with the Tahawi clan (Yehia, Mohammed, and of course Yasser) a couple of years later. Great things happened as a result of both encounters, knowledge gaps were filled, missing pieces of puzzle put together, and in the Tahawi case great progress was made on the preservation of the few remaining asil mares they have. The latest encounter of this type took place when Jibril Kareem Melko of the UK contacted me recently. He is the grandson of Mrs. Nazeera Qassis who was the niece of Dr. Iskandar Qassis. Dr. Qassis was the foremost preservationist Syrian horse breeder in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a well of…
Cathie Fye recently shared with me this picture of her 2003 Dahmah Shahwaniyah mare Thank Heaven (*Mlolshaan Hager Solomon x Llanys Winddancer x Ru Serr Llany), one of two daughters of the Bahraini stallion Mlolshaan in the USA. She is doing well in endurance, as she should. Look at the gaskin, and the clean hocks. Where do you see this anymore? I had already decided to breed one of my mares to this stallion before he is done, but seeing this photo confirms my decision. He will be 25 next year.
Someone from the EAO contacted me and asked me (nicely) to remove these two posts. I have a good relation with EAO management that’s based on mutual trust, so I have agreed. We will be taking that discussion off-line and starting a constructive dialogue on the future role the EAO sees for these Bahraini stallions. I will keep readers posted on how this dialogue evolves. Comments will stay because they are the readers’.
Someone from the EAO contacted me and asked me (nicely) to remove these two posts. I have a good relation with EAO management that’s based on mutual trust, so I have agreed. We will be taking that discussion off-line and starting a constructive dialogue on the future role the EAO sees for these Bahraini stallions. I will keep readers posted on how this dialogue evolves. Comments will stay because they are the readers’.
Abu al-Tayyeb is another one of these early Government Stud stallions in Syria, as was Sultan. That photo was also taken in 1958. He was reportedly a son of Krush Halba, the Kuhaylan Krush stallion from Lebanon that was sold to Turkey where he became a founding sire for the Turkish Arabian horse program. His dam was a Kuhaylat al-Krush from the Hama area in central Syria, and tracing to the Anazah Bedouins. His line is likely to be related to that of the Davenport imported mare *Werdi.
I just spoke to an old friend from Syria today. The economic situation is some parts of the country is so dire, cost of fodder has been multiplied by six, so much that people have been selling their asil mares and stallions to slaughterhouses in Iraq. I learned for instance that the young Kuhaylan al-Wati stallion from Shammar I had my eyes set on (below) was sold by the pound for meat. So sad, yet children are dying by the scores in both Syria and Iraq, so I will not shed a tear over a horse.
I had never heard of this branch of Kuhaylan until Radwan Shabareq told me about a number of Kuhaylat al-Beed (plural of al-Abyad, femine al-Baida) at the stud of Dr. Iskandar Qassis in Aleppo in the 1960s. I don’t know from which Bedouin tribe they came from.
I am very fond of these, because Arabic names in the period before Islam did not yet have a religious connotation. One of my favorites is the masculine name Mu’awiyah. It’s the name of the first Ummayyad Caliph, Mu’awiyah Ibn Abi Sufyan (661-680 AD), as well as that one of the kings of the ancient South-Arabian kingdom of Kinda in the third century A.D, whose capital was Qaryat al-Faw, in south central Arabia. It’s also my cousin’s name.. Interestingly, although a masculine name, it means something like “barking bitches”, or better still, “whining bitches”. By the way, the article I linked to above mentions a number of Arabic inscriptions from the collection of Sam Roach of ARAMCO. I wander if that’s the same as the importer of four Roach Blue Start horses to the USA.
Back in 2005, when we had just met, Hazaim al-Wair and I used to exchange horse photos on a quasi daily basis. One day he sent me this and two other photos of the stallions maintained by the Syrian Government’s Ministry of Agriculture in 1958. This photo shows the Ma’naqi Sbayli stallion Sultan.
A beautiful new website by Sandi Olson and Peter Bryant on another major passion of mine, Arabian archaeology.
Peter Harrigan’s latest article in Saudi Aramco World, on potential evidence for early equid domestication in Saudi Arabia.
A beautiful photo of the 1962 stallion Fa Knight (Fa Turf x Konight by Kaniht), a grandson of the desert-bred import *Turfa and a great grand-son of the desert-bred import *Samirah.
A recent photo of the 2006 Dahman Shahwan stallion DB Ibn Najem Huda at the stud of Rodger Vance Davis in Illinois. The rider in the photo is the Davis’ head trainer, Sarah Sanders who has been preparing him to be another one of her demo horses in her Ride with Excellence clinics. Photo by Lone Oak Photography.
Cindy, who trains the stallions at Desert Bred Arabians in Illinois sent me this impressive video of the horses of Rodger and Mimi Davis displaying their versatile athletic skills. Just watch it.. and watch it again.
The desert-bred ‘Ubayyah Suhayliyah mare Reem al-‘Ud, bred by the Shammar tribe in northeastern Syria, also known as “the mare of Mattori” from one of her past Bedouin owners, was featured several times on this blog. Here is yet another photo of her in extreme old age, which shows well the black skin around her eyes. Her last owner was Sh. Mayzar al-‘Ajil al-‘Abd al-Karim al-Muhammad al-‘Abd al-Karim al-Jarba, a descendant of the great Shammar hero ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jarba known as “Abu Khudah”.
While digging through old pictures, I came across this headshot of the asil Saqlawi stallion al-Abjar, which I took in the mid 1990s, at the studfarm of the late Hajj Amin Yakan near al-Bab, not far from Aleppo. He was a tall stallion of tremedous style, carriage and presence. My father is the man in the picture. I have already written about al-Abjar here. He was a Saqlawi Jadran of Ibn Zubayni, from the marbat of al-Dali’ (like his relative *Mirage), later in the marbat of the Mudariss family. There is still a thin tail female line running through his sister, in Damascus.
Raed Yaken, who lives in London but is originally from Aleppo, Syria, sent me these pictures of his asil mare Zohoor (“Flowers”), a Kuhaylah Hayfiyah bred by Alaa al-Din al-Jabri. Zuhur is by Mahrous (of Mustafa al-Jabri, his nephew) out of the small bay mare Durra whose photo was one of the first ones posted on this blog in 2008. Some time ago I also posted photos of Zohoor I saw both mares at Alaa al-Din Jabri’s back in 1991, and I also saw Durra’s dam Freihat; I remember all three of them very well. They are from the most asil, authenticated marbat of K. Hayfi in Syria, that of Wawi al-Kharfan of the Fad’aan. Theirs is one of the best marabit in Syria, and it is now with the Yakan family. His name is mistakenly spelled “Wadi” (which is not a man’s name, but means ‘valley’ in Arabic) in the Syrian Studbook and the error was picked up by others since. No one seems to remember who that Wawi al-Kharfan was, but he seems to have been one of the men of the Fad’aan Bedouin leaders Muqhim (Mijhim) al-Mayahd close circle. There is a lingering story, which I was…
While looking up ancient Arabian art over the Internet, I was struck by the expression of these two steles from a village near Hail, in Central Arabia. They were dated to the 4th millenium BC. These were displayed for the first time outside Saudi Arabia at an exhibition in the Louvre in Paris, then in Barcelona. I think the exhibition will be coming to the USA at some point soon.
This mare, Al-Shumuss, was at the stud of Mustafa al-Jabri in Aleppo in the 1990s, and her dam was at Radwan Shabareq’s. She was a Kuhaylat al-Krush, by a Hamdani Simri who was himself by the black Saqlawi Marzaqani stallion of al-Anoud, Princess of Tai; the mare’s dam was by the same black Saqlawi Marzaqani. The line came from the Shammar, from Rakan al-Nuri al-Mashal al-Jarba, but before that it was his maternal uncles the Tai chiefs; and while most everyone among the horse breeders in Syria thought this line traced back to the Krush al-Baida marbat of Mayzar ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Jarba of the Shammar (it is even registered as Krush al-Baida in the Syrian studbook) which ultimately goes back to the Mutayr Bedouins, it turned out, following questioning of the elders and leaders of the Tai Bedouins in the late 1990s that this Krush marbat actually came from the Fad’aan Bedouins of the ‘Anazah. There are two distinct lines of Kuhaylan Krush in North Arabia: one going back to the Fad’aan ‘Anazah (like Krush Halba below, like the Davenport import *Werdi, like the mare in this picture), and another line, known as Krush al-Baida (the white Krush) going back…
Teymur sent me this photo of the phenomenal 1921 grey asil Kuhaylan Krush stallion known in Lebanon as Krush Halba, and in Turkey as Baba Kurus. He was the foundation stallions for both countries asil Arabian horse breeding programs, even his line does not survive in Lebanon anymore, and is holding on by a thread in neighboring Syria. Teymur can tell you more about this horse’s performance in Turkey. Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from the diary of Dr. Ahmed Mabrouk’s of the Egyptian Royal Agricultural Society on this horse: “At Beirut I found a Krush, a nice grey horse who won 17 races. This horse out of El Nowagia by Krush belongs to Saad el Din Shatila Pasha. The sire of the Krush horse which I bought was sold a few years ago to the Turkish government …it is worth mentioning that in the only 3 stables I visited in Beirut, I saw about 30 offspring of the famous stallion Krush ….”. The Kuhaylan Nawwaq stallion named Kroush, who was imported by the same Dr. Mabrouk to Egypt for the RAS and sired a number of horses for the RAS, including the mare Bushra and the stallion Tamie’, was a son…
Arnault Decroix from France sent me this photo of two yearling fillies, daughter of his excellent Syrian asil stallion Dahiss Hassaka (Al-Ameer Dahiss x Ogharet by Marzouq, out of Hanadi), a Kuhaylan al-Nawwaq from the marbat of Shaykh Abd al-Jalil al-Naqashbandi, a leader of the Sufi Naqashbandi mystics of the Euphrates valley. Dahiss Hassaka (photo below) was bred by Radwan Shabareq and later imported to France. I owned his grandsire Dahiss, as well as a sister of his dam, “Zahra” who was by Dinar out of Hanadi. A head shot of hers was published earlier, you will find it if you scroll down.
This photo was also taken in the same place as the one below it, and it shows the same chestnut Hamdaniyat Ibn Ghurab mare as the mare in the center of the photo below, four years later. Jean-Claude Rajot, who I believe took it, and Arnault Decroix, visited the marbat of Ibn Ghurab and several other marabet in 2009, in their quest for asil desert-bred horses to bring back to France, in the first importation of this type and scale since the 1920s. They brought back one mare, Rafikat al-Darb, a Shuwaymah, as well as several stallions: Mahboub Halab, a Shuwayman; Nimr Shabareq, a Ma’anaqi; Dahess Hassaka, a Kuhaylan al-Nawwaq; Milyar Halab, a Kuhaylan al-Krush; and Shahm, a Ubayyan who, in my opinion, was the best of the lot, and died a premature death a few months after his importation, without having had the chance to leave offspring. Look at where the ears of the Hamdaniyah mare in the photo are set, and how they point. They horses are like wild animals, in this sense. Most of the Hamdani of Ibn Ghurab are of a very rich chestnut color; both Radwan Shabareq’s al-A’awar, and Basil Jadaan’s Mobarak, were of this…
Ameenah was the foundation mare for all the Kuhaylan al-Mimrah horses currently in Syria. They all trace to her in the tail female. She was bred by the Tai Bedouins, from a marbat that had belonged to the Shammar, and which traced all the back to the Muwayni’ clan of the Sba’ah Bedouins, who own the strain of Kuhaylan al-Mimrah. If a Kuhaylat al-Mimrah cannot be traced back to the clan of Ibn Muwayni’, then she is not a Kuhaylat al-Mimrah. That’s because the original man known al-Mimrah belonged to the Muwayni’ clan. The Muwayni’ clan, one of the noblest of the ‘Anazah confederation, were such famous breeders of Arabian horses that they were known as ‘ahl al-khayl’, the “people of the horses”. Nahar Ibn Muwayni’ is one of the Bedouin witnesses in the ‘Abbas Pasha Manuscript. Ameenah was sired by the “first horse of Juhayyim”, a Kuhaylan Hayfi who was used by Juhayyim al-Mitkhan of the Tai as his breeding stallion (he later stood a Kuhaylan al-Krush at stud, and this was the “second horse of Juhayyim”); her dam was sired by the “second horse of ‘Ebbo”, a Saqlawi Jadran of the strain belonging to Dari al-Mahmoud of the Shammar,…
I am posting a month-old photo of the young desert-bred stallion Nimr Shabareq at four years old so that readers can see how the horse has evolved over time. The second photo was taken when he was three, and the third one, when he was two. Hopefully, him, his owner and I will live a long life so I can keep posting photos of him every year to show you how he matures. Click on each photo to enlarge it.
This old mare was at Mustapha al-Jabri’s farm near Aleppo, Syria in the mid-1990s, when I took this picture, and was brought there to be covered by one of his stallions. She was one of these unregistered tribal horses, and came from the Aqaydat tribe, from the area of al-Mayadin on the Euphrates. Her strain was Samhan Qumay’. This is the only mare I have ever seen from this strain in my entire life, and I don’t think I will see another one. The strain was owned by the Sba’ah Bedouins among others. The Aqaydat of the Middle Euphrates area, who in the late 1800s and the early and mid 1900s were semi-nomadic sheep herders, and as such were much less mobile than the camel-breeding ‘Anazah Bedouins, would lease the elderly and the sick mares of the ‘Anazah, especially the Sba’ah, before these moved south towards Najd on their annual preregrinations. As a result of the most esteemed ‘Anazah strains found their way to ‘Aqaydat, including Ma’naqi Sbayli, ‘Ubayyan Sharrak, Hamdani Simri, and others. This mare was never registered eventually. There was conflicting information about a male ancestor (“Nawwaq ‘Abu ‘Erneh) four generations back in her pedigree, so she was left…
Last year, Jenny Krieg and Rodger Vance Davis teamed up to take two of Rodger’s mares to be bred to the old Bahraini stallion *Mlolshaan Hager Solomon, in Michigan. This stallion, who came from Bahrain as a gift to his present owner Bill Biel, is currently the only stallion in the USA who was born in Arabia Deserta. Until then he had produced one asil mare, and Jenny decided to do something about the 24 year old stallion got any older. Rodger’s Dahmat Shahwan mare foaled a big handsome colt with the foot turned the wrong way who had to be destroyed. But his Ubayyah mare, who is tail female to *Mahraa of Ibn Jalawi of Saudi Arabia, foaled a very special filly for Jenny last month, named Ubayyat al-Bahrain, below. I wished we had more fillies displaying as much character and true Arab features as this one. Jenny even tells me there are plans to bring two other Saudi mares from Rodger’s to Solomon this year. Fingers crossed for that, and for more Solomon foals. Photo by Jamie Lamborn.
Bay Saqlawiyah Ubayriyah bred by the Yusuf al-Du’bu of the Tai Bedouins, obtained by Hasan and ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Nassif of Tal Bisah, then gifted to Salim and Edouard Al-Dahdah, then given by them to Ahmad Ghalioun of Hims. Sire: the dark bay Ma’naqi Hadraji of Dhahir al-Ufaytan (asil); dam of a celebrated endurance winning mare, Wudyan; not registered in WAHO, and not 100% sure if asil. Should have been more diligent and taken the time to inquire further about her; but there were so many asil horses in Syria back in the early 1990s that trying to trace the origins of a non-registered mare was not always deemed worth the effort. Big mistake in this case. PS: I am at my father’s in Lebanon, scanning old pictures and posting some.
Black Kuhaylan Hayfi stallion at Mustafa Jabri in 1990. Sire: Mahrous; dam: a Kuhaylah Hayfiyah from the Shammar Bedouins. I don’t remember her name.