Category: General

The other day I spent a most beautiful day between Abu Kebeer and Geziret Saoud in the Sharqiyah province of Egypt with the Tahawis. Yehia Abdelsattar al-Tahawi, Mohammed Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi and Yasser Ghanem Barakat, their friends and I spent hours talking about horses and looking at them. One can hardly find people with a richer and better preserved equine tradition. As always with them, I learned new and interesting things that could benefit Egyptian horses. It is about the Kafr Ibrash farm, which is where the Inshass foundation mare  Bint Kareema was purchased from by the Inshass Stud. Here’s what we know about Bint Kareema: — She was a roan grey mare, born in 1935 and acquired from the “Kafr Ibrash Farm” by the Inshass Stud of King Fouad and his son King Farouk; — She was by Lady Anne Blunt’s Rasheed (Jamil Blunt x Zareefa), out of Kareema, a mare by a “Dahman” out of an “Obeya”; — She was sold to a Abd el Samad el Gayar on July 5, 1953, according to Pearson and Mol, first edition. — According to Judith Forbis’ Authentic Arabians, Volume 1, page 274, her strain was ‘Ubayyah’; this is perhaps an inference from her grand dam’s…

Here is a comment from Gerd, from Chile: “Three friends, readers of his blog, also inspired by the Blog, joined forces to try to keep the line of a Tahawy Arabian mare who arrived in Chile. So they found 3 mares.The only Arabs asil there are in chile are Egyptian, so they must continue in that line. Dreaming,they hope someday import semen from some asil stalion. It shall be from France as health formalities are easier for chile.”

(This post will remain on the top of the page of Daughters of the Wind for  a month. Fore more recent posts, scroll down please) If you want to support the goals of the Al Khamsa Preservation Task Force of rescuing, rehoming and advocating for Al Khamsa Arabian horses from rare, precious and endangered lines, you can now make donations by PayPal, by visting this page (click here). Over the past week alone, we raised 2,450 USD from generous Al Khamsa supporters, and the goal is to reach 5.000 USD by the end of next week. You can also get there by going to to the Al Khamsa website site main page (www.alkhamsa.org) and click on the “Donations” banner to the right. There, you can either chose to support the Al Khamsa General Fund, the Preservation Task Force, or the Al Khamsa Endurance Award. The goals of the Al Khamsa Preservation Task Force for 2012 are to: 1) identify bloodlines in danger of being lost, and classify them in order of most urgent to less urgent (Code Red and Code Orange lists); write about them and advocate for them; search for horses from these bloodlines and their owners; establish a…

  Black Sambo (Mahroun x Biroufa by Khebir) was the sire of the two Managhi Sbayli mares Milanne and Velours who are the source of the asil Ferida tail female in the USA, through the excellent mare Fejr (Rijm x Feluka out of Ferida), also photo below. You’ve go to love that powerful Crabbet hindquarter on Fejr.

Check out this really nice picture blog about Egypt.

I grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, witnessed my shared of charred bodies and bloodstains on the sidewalks, and consider myself rather immunized against violent sights, but this photo of a little one sobbing after Thursday’s suicide bombing near a school in Damascus (83 dead, including several dozen children) broke my heart, and haunts me at night since I saw it first three days ago. If hatred-filled “grownups” want to kill each other until no man is left standing, and no stone left on top of another stone, it’s their problem, but what do this little one and his dead and injured classmates have to do it with it? In the name of what was this done to this little one? Freedom? This word loses its value when such crimes are committed in its name.

Some time ago, I announced on this blog a series of blog posts on “ten myths about Straight Egyptian pedigrees”, which I contended were harder to dispel than misconceptions about other groups of Arabian horses (see here, and the ensuing discussion). I did not plan to start with this one, but a recent side discussion about El Samraa (INS) on this blog prompted me to do it. So here’s the first “myth” in this series: The 1924 Inshass Stud foundation mare “El Samraa”, entry is #13 in the “Inshass Original Herd Book“, is listed as sired by a stallion named “Hab El Reah” and out of a mare named “Bint El Sheik”. I always thought these were unusual names for horses but did not second guess the information until recently. It turns out these are not horse names at all, and the explanation is fascinating. Here’s why: In a number of hujaj (original Arabian horse certificates in the Arabic language) dating from the early to the late twentieth century, references are made to individual horses being “from Habt El Reah and Nabt (not Bint) El Sheeh”, in Arabic “min habbat al-reeh wa nabata al-sheeh”, a phrase which rhymes in Arabic. Below…

Is anyone interested in going through the online roster and tracking down how many tail female Rabanna mares of breeding age?    

Then send US$ checks payable to Al Khamsa Inc. designating the money for the Preservation Task Force. Send by postal service to Al Khamsa Business Office, 7275 Manchester Road, Capron, Illinois 61012, USA.

Photo by Syrian traveler Hussain Ibish, who was accompanying faculty from the American University of Beirut (AUB, my alma mater) to a trip to the Syrian desert in 1935. I am sure the AUB library has a lot of hidden treasures about this period and part of the world.

Gleaned off the internet.. an announcement about the spring festival of 1937 in Deir El Zor, Syria.

See what you could with mtDNA? Modern breeders who knowingly cheated with Arabian female lines should be scared… “Despite this, a team of enthusiasts and historians traced the likely area – and, crucially, also found a 17th-generation descendant of Richard’s sister with whose DNA they could compare any remains recovered. Genealogical research eventually led to a Canadian woman called Joy Ibsen. She died several years ago but her son, Michael, who now works in London, provided a sample. The researchers were fortunate as, while the DNA they were looking for was in all Joy Ibsen’s offspring, it is only handed down through the female line and her only daughter has no children. The line was about to stop […]. She added: “There is a DNA match between the maternal DNA of the descendants of the family of Richard III and the skeletal remains we found at the Greyfriars dig. In short, the DNA evidence points to these being the remains of Richard III.” Read the full article here, and a related article here.  

                                                                                                    I was re-reading Edouard’s December 11th, 2012 post on the photo of Haleb in 1906 with the Anazah Bedouin and how he is a “benchmark”. Haleb was a huge early influence on me as a novice because I noticed this minimalist aesthetic that he had in the photos that I had seen — the same quality in which we admire the Gazelle for its natural beauty combined with supreme function. Nothing to excess and everything in its place as Homer Davenport once said. No doubt this is what the Bedouin celebrated in their poetry. In a certain light, even the camel is a beautiful animal for its supreme function without any excess for its purpose. Now is wish to comment about benchmarks. I still tend to see the Egyptian horse in kinships with its tribal bred cousins rather than apart from them. I realize that modern tastes and a restless…

I enjoyed the story that Edouard related about the Shammar Hadba female line and indeed it has fame in American racing bloodlines through Kontiki. It also interesting to note that in the Al Khamsa bloodlines one branch of the Hadba Davenport dam line has distinguished itself in racing according to AJC and DataSource. First of all, posted above are two chestnut mares and a yearling colt. The first mare is the Davenport mare Waddarlah (El Alamein x Trisarlah) and the second mare is her full sister Letarlah. Both of these mares were bred by Carolyn (Kiki) Case of the famed Glorieta Ranch. Glorieta is mainly renowned for the straight Egyptians it bred which have a big international following particularly in the Gulf and Egypt. However Kiki also had these two Davenport mares, one of which was at Glorieta when I visited in the mid 1970s, that was Letarlah. Waddarlah had just gone to Illinois before I arrived and became well known in Davenport breeding, particularly for her daughters Bint Oberon and full sister Aischia. Letarlah remained at Glorieta until the early 1980s when she then produced for Davenport lines. Prior to their Davenport breeding careers these two sisters at Glorieta…

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Daughters of the Wind, and the 5th anniversary of my daughter Samarcande who inspired this website. She is now a young lady, a future champion swimmer and horse-back rider. She also loves ice cream.. I realize I have been less active than in previous years; this is partly because I am a much busier person now than I was before, and partly because the needs to act, and act fast, before it is too late on preservation emergencies in North America. This has increasingly shifted my focus from advocating for the preservation of the precious few Asil Arabian horses to actually helping undertake the time-consuming, labor-intensive, tedious and often uninspiring but oh-so-rewarding tasks of preservation in the context of the Al Khamsa Preservation Task Force: identifying the horses; contacting their owners, finding new homes; arranging leases, shipping, following up on breeding, etc. I will also be moving to Egypt for work in a few months, for a two or three year stint, and I hope I will be both less busy at work and more active on this website. Meanwhile, Samarcande was joined by a little sister three months ago. Solenn Hend Al-Dahdah is…

This is what winter looks like in Northern California. And this is what a 19yo Davenport mare looks like when training a young eventer (note stirrups crossed over withers). Bruce Peek will immediately note the reach of her inside hind. 🙂 Blessings of the new year to you all — Ambar

Jose Manuel from Spain sent me this nice note: “I am a follower of your blog and I would like to tell you thanks so much for your wisdom about the arabian horse and the Bedouins because they go together. following your suggestions I saw the stallion Najm Yarob in abrash krush stud  near Madrid( if you want you have photos of him in the stud website) and I  bought him to breed to my Egyptian mares. Please continue writing; you are helping many asil arabian horses (for exemple, najm yarob). I THINK IF YOU SEE THIS HORSE YOU WOULD LIKE HIM. YOURS SINCERELY.” I want to tell him: your courage (yes, this requires courage) encourages me.

Photo from the Davenport Project on Facebook. This was the benchmark for an Arabian stallion, by the way. Today’s beauty champion winners belong to another race, a distant descendant from the original one. They are post-Arabians, and it is time to recognize this fact.

I have one thing to say to those Arabian horse breeders around the world who cheated by replacing a mare with another, and registering the progeny of the second mare as being from first: with mtDNA scientific progress on your doorsteps and the genetic tracing of female lines, you are doomed.  You, your horses and your reputation. For those who did a similar deed by registering one stallion’s progeny as another’s, your turn is coming soon.

Something needs to be done for the Syrian Arabian horses in the Aleppo area, fast. The price of fodder has been multiplied by ten, and horses from solid studs are starving. Some of us are trying to think of long term solutions, fast. A question here: it is currently difficult to get export papers from the government. Suppose horses are made to cross the border with Turkey, without export papers, vet papers, but with their registration papers, what would happen to their registration? Would it be possible to register them in another country post-factum? Or are they not register-able forever?  Is one harming the potential future contribution of these horses to the breed by getting them outside of the country without proper papers?

I am stuck in the Frankfurt airport on my way to Cairo (again) because of a snowstorm, and was reading this future studies article on what the Middle East will be looking like fifty years from now.  The scenarios outlined are quite grim. Most of them involve a combination of large-scale and extended droughts, environmental degradation (salinity and rapid urbanization are rapidly killing the Nile Delta), water shortages (San’aa, the capital of Yemen will be the first city in the world to completely run out of water by 2020– that’s in 7 years), water wars, demographic explosion, urban unrest in sprawling slums, large scale unemployment, violence, etc. This brings me to the subject of the survival of the Desert Arabian horse in its original homeland, which is seriously threatened. It reinforces my belief that the valuable genetic material still available in the Middle East will need to find its way to more stable parts of the world (like the USA or Canada, because I just don’t see Western Europe on a path of long term stability) where it can be preserved for generations to come. I am not talking about the high-end, overbred, delicate Egyptian Arabian horse creatures that grace Egyptian and Gulf studs; the blood of Nazeer, Moniet, Bukra, etc, is all over the world, and it’s not…

Jamal Pasha, known as al-Saffah (“The Blood Shedder”) was governor of the Ottoman Vilayet of Syria just before World War I. He is shown here surrounded by the Shaykhs of Iraqi Bedouin tribes, celebrating the completion of the al-Hindya dam on the Euphrates river near al-Hilla, south of Baghdad. Photo from Wikipedia.

I had never seen this one of him. From the Davenport Project on Facebook. Titled: “Muson at the New Jersey State Fair, 1907”  

I have just returned from an exhausting trip to Cairo, Egypt, and will be back on Daughters of the Wind soon.  Sorry for the prolonged absence.

This facebook website pictures some of the widespread desctruction that befell several historical sites and old cities in Syria. “Like it” or rather, dislike it..

I am quoting this passage of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s “My Diaries, being a personal narrative of events, 1888-1914” about his visit to the stud of the Ottoman Sultan in 1893, page 126: “In the evening we drove to the Sweet Waters and were shown the Sultan’s mares. There were, I believe, about 150 of them, all ‘mares from the Arabs’, but the greater part of them of very small account. Among the herd, however, one was able to pick out about a dozen really good ones, and two or three of the first class. But there was no mare there at all equal to Ali Pasha Sharif’s best, or the best of our own. The best I found had come from Ibn Rashid who, two years ago, sent thirty. But the Egyptian who manages the establishment tells me they will insist upon tall horses, and I fancy the Bedouin who send the Sultan mares get the big ones on  purpose for him, and keep the little ones, which are the best. There was a great hulking mare which Sotamm Ibn Shaalan had brought with him, one I feel sure was never foaled among the Roala. Of horses, they showed us…

I am going to start a new series on this blog on “ten myths about Egyptian pedigrees”. Stay tuned.    

Recently I reactivated my “Daughters of the Wind” page on Facebook. Everything I post here will show there, and so will the comments you post here. One basic rule I learned from the social media types at my work is that, if you want to reach more people, you’d better go where they already are (i.e., to Facebook) rather than have them come to you (i.e., this website). Of course I will also write from this website here, and those among you who are blessed enough not have a Facebook account will not be missing anything.

Read it here.

Just like “code is poetry” to the WordPress blogging community, to me the way sires and dams, strains and names, tail males and tail females combine to make a pedigree come to life feels like the rhymes and rythm of verses in a poem. Bad pedigrees are like bad poems, I cannot read them without cringing. A good pedigree on the other hand is something I can gaze at for hours, marveling at the delicate craftsmanship and genius — sometimes unintentional — behing them. Look at this one for instance, or this one, or this one: can you hear them speaking to you? Below, my favorite poem, from Rimbaud  

Lisa is asking how well Davenport and Part Davenport Arabians do in high level endurance racing. Does anyone have numbers, facts, etc to share?

I went to see Jadiba and her foal on a rainy day couple weeks ago, and all I could back with were a few head shots of which this is one, against an unflattering background.

Take a preview of the 2015 Arabian Horse World Championships, and get your snorkels and wet suits ready if you don’t want to miss them. Notice the “ultra-refined” head, “exotic” arched neck, the “classic” dished profile, and the “extreme” muzzle of this young competitor. The eyes would have looked bigger if the makeup wasn’t wiped away by the water. Don’t waste time looking for legs, there aren’t any: toothpick legs are deja-vu (so pre-2010!), the new fashion is no legs at all!    

From the archives of the Institut Francais du Proche-Orient in Damascus

I found an interesting online database of Arabian horse pedigrees, which includes “all Arabians bred by Wilfred Blunt, Lady Anne Blunt, Lady Wentworth, Cecil Covey between 1878 – 1971”. It seems serious, and is perhaps based on access to the Blunts’ various studbooks. I am going to use it.  

Someone Marie Arthur posted this picture on Facebook of the Kuhaylah Hayifyah Davenport mare EK Asiirah UF (Portico x Astranah by Astrologer) bred by Joyce Gregorian, and it struck me. I really like this mare. I even like her one obvious defect: a shorter and thicker neck, which is/was the case with  many many desert bred Arabians of the past. That long swan-like over-arched neck is a ugly western invention. Rather, notice the black skin around the muzzle and the eyes, and that overall air of shyness, gentleness, and modest femininity, as if the mare was ashamed of being so beautiful.