Both Mohammad al-Tahawi and Yasir Ghanim have sent me a new link to the website on the Tahawi Bedouins where they have uploaded many, many more documents about the original Tahawi horses, including the herd-book of their leader Shaykh Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi, which contains hundreds of entries documenting purchases of horses from the desert, dates of breedings, foal productions, sale records, etc. It is a treasure trove of information like no other, and it establishes the asil credentials of the Tahawi horses beyond any doubt. I will even go further to point of saying that many Tahawi horses are by now more authenticated than the majority of desert-breds from the RAS (e.g., Halabia, Nafaa al-Saghira, Badaouia, Eid, etc), and Inshass (e.g., El Samraa, El Shahbaa, Badria, Beshier El Achkar, Bint Karima). It’s a paradise of primary sources for those who love the original Bedouin horses. This is of course related to the great work Bernd Radtke is doing with his upcoming book, about which those of you went to the EE (Extreme and Exotic) already heard. I will be slowly working on the translation of these documents over the next several weeks. I think I need to find a replacement at…
Following yesterday’s last blog, Jeanne Craver sent me these rare pictures of the 1949 Saqlawi al-‘Abd (back to *Urfah) mare Shasinada (Hanad x Shasi by Asil) and her 1942 dam Shasi (Asil x Sherah by *Hamrah), courtesy of Nyla Eshelman. Both mother and daughter are of the old Bedouin type that was prevalent in the USA in the 1930s and 1940s but has all but disappeared in modern Arabian breeding. Note the resemblance between Shasinada and the 1993 Davenport mare WDA Hyapatia Lee (Bon Jour CF X Sarsaparilla by Dharanad) that was recently posted on the Davenport Arabian Horse Conservancy website (and below).
Shasinada (Hanad x Shadi by Asil out of Sherah by *Hamrah) was a Hanad daughter (read RJ Cadranell’s article about the legacy of Hanad here) and an asil Saqlawiyat al-‘Abd, whose pedigree primarily (99%) consists of horses imported from the desert by Homer Davenport in 1906, with a touch of Major Upton’s bloodlines. She was very closely related to the Craver stallion Tripoli (Hanad x Poka by *Hamrah). Today, there are probably two mares left tracing to this mare, left alive, and they don’t seem to have registered progeny. ML Ayriana is one (TreffHaven Ruabbas x ML Roushana by Treff-Haven Hotai out of Shamma El Ajzaa by *Sanaad out of Shasinada), and ML Shariaa (TreffHaven Ruabbas x ML Malika by Treff-Haven Hotai out of Shamma El Ajzaa by *Sanaad out of Shasinada) is the other. They were born in 1992 and 1989 respectively. I am going to track them down.
Click here for pictures of a “cute” horse from Saudi Arabia, aptly called Sabeh, “Panther”.
Those of us preservationists who have a mare or two, and can’t afford to breed them every year, always find it harder to choose stallions when the time comes to breed their mare. They have to live with the consequences of their decisions, and this alone tends to make them more risk averse. Of course, the new world of opportunities opened by artificial insemination techniques makes such decisions all the more difficult to make. I am finding myself in this situation now that it is time to breed Jadiba. Even more, I am asking myself a lot of questions, like: — should I just pick the best horse for my mare, the horse who will correct her defects, and emphasize her qualities, and hope for offspring that are “better” (prettier?) than both parents? — or should I pick the horse a Bedouin would have picked, using Bedouin standards of selection (if these could indeed be generalized), because I want to breed the kind of horse Bedouins — as custodians of the breed — wanted? I always thought I should do the latter, which is an intellectual view. Now I am not sure anymore. All I know that I need to…
I saw this quote on the blog of Ralph Suarez, and it’s from Lady Anne Blunt: “An inborn love of the horse is instinctive, quite unreasoning, and one cannot recall any beginning of what seems to have always been there, together with a craving for perfection in the object of interest.”
Check this good article on the CMK website. It was compiled by W.R. Brown and published in the Arabian Stub Book [volume 2] in 1918.
A very interesting discussion started from a question of parentage [Note from Edouard cf. the post on Tabab below] leading to the question of who the bedouin horse is. Do the horses of Abbas Pasha and other Egytian notables belong to the authentic, asil Arabian horse or not? Can You call them bedouin horses the same way You call Davenports or Saudi lines bedouin horses? My answer is : YES. And if I understand Lady Anne right she had the same opinion. Just yesterday I have read in her journals correspondence the part about Davenport (before reading this) and she had questions regarding Davenport´s horses. How could he manage to bring so many pure Arabians home in such a short time? Achmet Hafez has been the key to this. Davenport states he was the head of all Aneze tribes. This is questioned by Lady Anne expressis verbis. My opinion is that Davenport did not understand who Achmet Hafez really was and therefore gave him the wrong title. My suggestion is that he was the Bab el Arab of the Aneze tribes for the pasha of Damascus [Note from Edouard: rather, of Aleppo]. He handled all questions regarding the tribes, but…
Tabab, 1921 stallion, was by *Deyr out of the bay Domow, who was out of the chestnut *Wadduda. Who Domow’s sire really was is not easy to figure out. Her registered sire is the Crabbet stallon *Abu Zeyd (Mesaoud x Rose Diamond), a chestnut but the colors don’t match because two chestnuts can’t produce a bay, and it looks instead like she may have been by *Astraled (Mesaoud x Queen of Sheba), who was bay. [Update: See Michael Bowling’s and RJ Cadranell’s article in Jeanne Craver’s comment on this thread]
The head of this mare illustrates several features to be found in old style (‘atiq), Bedouin-type Arabian horses in their homeland. I have seen these features in Bedouin-bred Arabian mares time and again. Some of them are commonly found in modern Arabian horses, like good distance between the ear and the eye, others less so: — a large deep jowl: while “large” is easily understood, one can get an idea of the “depth” of a jowl by following the curved line of the jowl inwards (ie, towards the muzzle) as deeply into the head as possible. — a lower lip extending slightly beyond the upper lip, like camels’. — the back of the lower lip (towards the jowls) is arched inwards (concave), and the more prominently featured and the deeper that arch is, the better, from a Bedouin-type perspective. — watery eyes: many horses (especially in the Straight Egyptian group) today have big, uniformly black eyes, “full”, which look like the eyes of small birds. It looks as if jet black ink is ready to spill out of the eye, if poked. Bedouin-type eyes are different. Sure, they are blakc, but they look more like humans’ eyes, sometimes even to…
The lovely Kuhaylan Hayfi stallion Porte CF (Portico x Recherche by Prince Hal) is now with Ambar Diaz in California, and is looking very good. Porte CF was owned by Pamela Klein, who gave him to Ambar. He’s pictured here with Michael Bowling.
Clarion (Regency x Chinoiserie by Dharanad), a 1991 Hamdani Simri is another candidate for Jadiba.
He is with Debbie Jessen in Illinois, and a good horse, with a good pedigree. A 2003 Regency son, out of a Plantagenet daughter, out of a Sir Marchen grand-daughter, adding a line to the handsome Ibn Hanad (last headshot in black and white). The first photo shows Chancery as a five years old, and the second and third as a growthy four year old. Asil Arabians of Davenport bloodlines are slow growers, and do no fully mature before 7 or 8 years old. Note the very short back, the deep girth, and the free shoulder movement. In the last photo with Charles Craver, note the width between the eyes, the broad forehead, the protruding eye sockets, the length of the distance between the eye and the base of the ear, the small muzzle, the wide and delicate nostrils, and the prominent facial bones. Note the resemblance with the Ibn Hanad cropped headshot, too. He is one of the three or four horses in my shortlist for breeding Jadiba to.
I really liked the yellow one in the middle, he should have won, but the judges thought the green one looked more ‘extreme’ and ‘exotic’… but it certainly was a tough call. Maybe next year, with green eye-makeup instead of the red..
This is a photo of Jadiba’s dam, Jabinta (Jadib x Bint Malakah by Subani), also courtesy of Jeanne Craver. As you can see, she has none of her daughter’s conformational defects: longer neck (or is it picture?), shorter back, longer ears. I like this mare better than I do her daughter.
An old photo of Jadiba taken by her previous owner Annette Pattishall, from Joe Ferriss’ Khamsat article, courtesy of Jeanne Craver.
El Alamein (Dhareb out of Antarah by Antez), a 1943 Kuhaylan Haifi, and one of four full siblings, who were at the heart of the rebirth of Davenport breeding. Shown here in old age, and blind from an infection (hence the swollen eye). Charles Craver handling.
I was re-reading the Cravers’ “Annotated Quest” the other day, and came upon this description of *Wadduda by Homer Davenport, which had marked me the first time I read years ago: “The war mare, the present from the Supreme Ruler, was the chestnut. She seemed to be fretting to get out of the only town she had ever been in. In her highly carried tail, I saw some blue beads tied gracefully in her hair. I knew they were to keep off the ‘Evil Eye’ […]. Her names they told me was “Wadduda”, meaning “love”; that she was a Seglawie Al Abed, seven years old and had been the favorite war mare of Hashem Bey for four years. She didn’t like the town, she wanted to go — and those who told me pointed to the desert.”
Monika Luft writes: A sensational discovery: Unknown letters of Bogdan Ziętarski and Carl Raswan from their expedition to Arabia! Polskiearaby.com have unearthed documents which cast a new light on the famous horse-buying expedition for the stud of Prince Roman Sanguszko in Gumniska near Tarnów. Several letters, discovered 80 years after being written, bring surprising details on one of the most extraordinary expeditions of the 20th century. More here: http://www.polskiearaby.com/?page=ludzie_i_konie&lang=en&id=52 See Edouard’s previous quote from Bogdan Ziętarski.
Wendy Clark has taken up the torch on the preservation of the American asil Arabian horses that trace in tail female to the outstanding *Turfa, a Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz from the stables of Saudi Arabia’s King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Aal Saud, and imported to the USA in 1941 by Henri Babson.These tail female *Turfa’s and other precious asil Arabians with lines to this mare are now critically endangered, after having been very popular with many breeders up to the 1980s. Recently, Wendy obtained the 1995 mare Bint Ibn Hilweh (Ibn Muhandis x Alah Al Abayyah), a tail female *Turfa, and added her to her *Turfa preservation breeding program. The mare seems to have been neglected by her previous owners, and is now recovering slowly at Wendy’s. The photo below is from before that time, when she was still with her breeder Susan Whitman. I first saw this photo on Susan’s website ten years ago, and this was one of two of my favorite mares.
Not sure if I have linked to this article by Pat Payne on the horses of F.E. Lewis, an early breeder of asil Arabians of Davenport bloodlines in California, and mostly known as the breeder of Antez (Harara x Moliah by Hamrah). It’s posted on the website of the Davenport Arabian Horse Conservancy (DAHC), which is worth checking regularly for other historical articles.
Reader Amirhosein Ghasemi from Iran is the administrator of the online Persian Horse Forum, and a breeder of asil Araiban horses, and turkmen and Kurdish horses too. He sent me these breathtaking photos of one of his asil stallions, Nasman. I am completely taken with this horse. His strain, also Nasman, is now only found in Iran, and traces back to the old Arab tribe of Bani Lam (so do the Hadban, Shuwayman and Wadnan strains).
This is the well balanced and very correct stallion Saqlawi Jadran stallion Jadib (Ghadaf x Gulida by Gulastra), bred in 1954 by Ellen Doyle, with young Barbara Baird up. He carries ten close crosses to the Blunt’s Mesaoud (through his sons Seyal, Harb, Astraled, Abu Zeyd and Daoud, and his daughter Risala), and it shows.
just very busy with unfolding events in the Middle East.. I will resume writing soon.
I recently received some fresh news from Muhammad al-Tahawy who maintains the fascinating website of the Tahawi tribe with a large section dedicated to their horses. Muhammad directs me to one of the sections of the website, where he is regularly uploading photos and documents of original horses purchased by the Tahawi from Syria, mainly from the central city of Hama, a major horsebreeding center near the pastures of the Sba’ah Bedouins. Here is one such photo, reproduced with his permission. This is the legend on the back of the photo, and my translation follows: “This mare, a Kuhaylat al-Mimrah, now in Hama at the Iskafi [‘the shoemaker’, not clear whether it’s a reference to the owner’s surname or his profession], and she is the daughter of the grand old mare, whose owner was offered 800 gold pounds and refused to sell her, and she [i.e., the dam] is currently with him.” The information on the back of the photo does not tell us who the owner of the dam was, but we know this from another source: in his book “the Arab horse”, Hama native and racehorse owner Ali al-Barazi talks about the Kuhaylat al-Mimrah mare of Mukhtar [Mumtaz,…
Daughters of the Wind is now on both Facebook and Twitter.
The cause of the asil Arabian horse in the USA just gained a major boost last week, with the coming of Hazaim Alwair to this country. Hazaim, a heart surgeon, and a native of Hims in Syria, is now settled in Greenville, NC, and is more knowledgeable and passionate bout the Syrian asil Arabian horse than anyone I know. Wait till you meet him, and you’ll understand what I mean.
In this photo, Bill Cody (Buffalo Bill) on *Muson, and Said Abdallah on *Wadduda, face off in a the Wild West show in 1907. Both *Muson and *Wadduda were imported from the Arabian desert by Homer Davenport in 1906; Said Abdallah, one of the slaves of Bedouin leader Hakim Ibn Mhayd came to the USA with *Wadduda, which he did not want to leave.
An exciting collaborative project that brings together Jeanne Craver, Radwan Shabareq, Joe Ferriss and your favorite Arab blogger is in the works, which will hopefully find its way on the equine section of your bookshelves as of this coming June. I foresee its impact on the scholarship on Arabian horses to be nothing short of transformational. More in the coming weeks…
Take a look at the descendants of the 1920 stallion Ribal (Berk x Rijma by Rijm), one of the foundation sires of old American (asil) Arabian horse breeding: he has 11 progeny that bred on within Al Khamsa (asil) lines; I am re-listing them below: 1. Baribeh, out of Babirah (who is from 100% Blunt lines) 2. Ghadaf, out of Gulnare (who is from 100% Blunt lines) 3. Ghanighat, out of Guemura (who is from Blunt and other Old English lines) 4. Ghawi, out of Gulnare (100 % of Blunt lines) 5. Sahalli, out of Sherah (who is from 100% Davenport lines) 6. Curfa, out of Nardina (who is from 100% Blunt lines) 7. Pareta, out of Zenee (who is mostly from Davenport lines) 8. Borkaan, out of Babe Azab (who is from 100% Davenport lines) 9. Caravan, out of Fasal (who is from 100% Davenport lines) 10. Royal Amber, out of Babe Azab (see above) 11. Yakouta, out of Ferdika (who is from 100% Blunt lines) All of these 11 offspring of Ribal are otherwise foundation horses of early American breeding and have bred on successfully outside the asil realm. Of these 11 lines, no less than five lines…
I am taking a break from writing about asil horses to support my Egyptian and Yemeni friends as they fight for democracy against the oppressive regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Ali Abdallah Saleh. Arab horses and heritage are important, but Arab freedom and dignity are more important. By the same occasion, you get are rare glimpse into my political views. 😉
This is Mayzar al-‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Jarba, a leader of the Shammar in Syria and an MP in the Syrian House of Representatives in the 1940s. He was the owner (sahib or ra’i) of the marbat of the Kuhaylan Krush strain as Krush al-Baida, or Krush al-‘Abd al-Muhsin. The desert-bred stallion Mokhtar, now in France and often featured on this blog, is from his marbat.
I just emerged from three days without power because of a heavy snowstorm in the Mid-Atlantic region. It’s good to be back.
Ralph just nominated Daughters of the Wind for the Bloggers Choice Award under the “best animal blogger” category (sometimes, I forget that Arabian horses are animals, but that was a useful reminder). I am not sure what this entails, but if you like this blog more than other animal blogs, click here and vote for it by clicking on the yellow “vote” button. Thanks, Ralph, how thoughtful of you.
Check out this compelling article, by W. Michael Briggs Jr., on the website of the Davenport Arabian Horse Conservancy. It is graced with the picture of the beautiful Kuhaylan Hayfi stallion Audobon LD (Iliad x Audacity by Lysander), ridden by owner Marge Smith, and by the Hamdani Simri stallion Personic LF (Ibn Don Carlos x Persephone by Regency CF), photo below by Christine Emmert.
Radwan Shabareq of Aleppo told me the fascinating story of what is believed to be Thomas Darley’s rifle. Thomas Darley was Her Majesty’s Consul to the Levant, based in Aleppo, during the reign of British Queen Anne. In 1702, Thomas Darley acquired a young colt from the Fad’aan ‘Anazah Bedouins, which became the most prepotent of three foundation stallions of the English Thoroughbred horse breed. This was the “Darley Arabian”. Radwan told me that he had heard the story of Darley’s rifle from Raymond Juwayyid, an elderly Alepine collector, many years ago. According to Juwayyid, an ‘Anazeh Bedouin came to an Armenian jeweler in downtown Aleppo in the early XXth century to sell a long rifle intricately ornated with silver. Upon being asked for its provenance, the Bedouin admitted that he stolen it from his Shaykh, who had had it in his family for several generation. He reportedly claimed that his Shaykh would refer to the rifle as “Darley’s rifle”, and it was treasured family heirloom. The Armenian jeweler bought the rifle, and later sold it to Nu’man al-Dali’ (see the entry on *Mirage’s strain below, which is how I learned of this story), who gave it to his heirs, who gave it to Raymond…
Today, Daughters of the Wind turned three. I recall starting this blog on January 11, 2008, towards the last days of my wife’s pregnancy, to keep in touch with a small circle of likeminded friends and breeders of asil Arabians. I had become aware that the duties of a soon-to-be-father were going to make it harder for me to see these friends and enjoy the horses and the horse talk as often as I would have liked, and I felt I had to find a way to remain in touch online. This small circle of breeders and horse enthusiasts had been exchanging regular group emails about preservations issues, and I thought a blog would provide an appropriate platform. I never thought it would become what it is now: a truly global community of enthusiasts dedicated to the preservation of the original qualities and heritage of the asil Arabian horse. Neither did I ever think it would achieve its current status as the number 1 most visited website on Arabian horses at large. Indeed, a quick look at traffic ranking websites this morning puts Daughters of the Wind among the 75,000 most visited websites in the USA on any subject, up from 12 millions when it started. This…
The Egyptian foundation mare Venus is the tail female for one of Egypt’s most successful lines. The stallions Nazeer, Aswan, Khofo, and the mares Yosreia, Samha, Kamla, all come from this line, and so do countless others. Page 63 of Egypt’s Royal Agricultural Society’s Volume I Studbook, also known as the RAS History, has Venus as a chestnut Hadbah Inzihiyah imported in 1893 to Egypt by Hassan Abu Amin Agha, later in the stud of Khedive (Egypt’s Viceroy) Abbas II Hilmi. There is no recorded information as to her tribal provenance in the RAS History. The only tribal information on Venus comes from Carl Raswan. Venus, like other horses owned by the Western educated Abbas II (he was still studying in Vienna when he was called to assume the throne upon the sudden death of his father), had a Western name. She was called Venus after the Roman goddess of love. Another Egyptian foundation mare from the same stud, and probably from the same provenance, was known as the “Halabia mare”, or the ‘mare from Aleppo’ (Halab in Arabic), but she had a Western name, Carmen, after the opera of Bizet. Carl Raswan, who had a habit of conflating Arabian horses’…
Joe Achcar passed away this morning, from a heart attack. I will miss him sorely. This place will not be the same without him.
Recently, I wrote here about the little-known group of horses from the Hadban strain tracing to the desert-bred mare *Hadba, imported by Homer Davenport from Arabia in 1906. The hujjah (Arabic authentication certificate) of that mare is available, and I did a new translation of it, which appeared in the reference book Al Khamsa Arabians III (2008). I am reproducing an updated, revised version of this translation here: We, who put our names and seals below, based on our honor, say that the bay mare whose has a stocking on her left hind leg and a star on her face, that her dam is a Hadbah to be mated and her sire is Shuwayman Sabbah, and the sire of her filly is Ma’naqi Sbayli; Abd al-Sakam Azraq took this mare from Hajj Ismail the Shaykh of Sfireh, and Hajj Ismail took her from ‘Ajil ibn Zaydan the Shaykh of Shammar, and for the sake of clarity, we have put our names and seals [below]. Written by: Abdessalam Azraq [seal] From the people of [the town of] Sfireh: Muhammad Nur [or Nadar or Thawr, unclear] [finger print] Ahmad al-Muhammad [seal] Mustapha al-Bdeiwi [seal] Hajj Ahmad al-Abdallah from the tribe of al-Fardun [seal] Ahmad Sarraj [seal] I swear by God…
Yesterday, Lisa from the UK asked about the meaning of the word “Kuhaylan” and its feminine “Kuhaylah”, as applied to Arabian horses; I won’t tell you anything that most of you don’t know already, I only want to give a sense of its etymology. If you want to understand the meaning of a concept in Arabic, you need to keep a couple things in mind: first, that the Arabic language was developed and enriched by poets — famously, at such venues as the Arabian market of Okaz, which by the way has recently been revived; indeed, the oldest evidence of Arabic language ever comes from an inscription found in 1979 at Ein Avdat in the Negev desert. The inscription dates from the 1st century of our era (0-100 AD) and consists of six lines, two of which are in Arabic, and they are in verse. So, in a nutshell, not only is poetry a central feature of Arab culture in general, and Bedouin culture in particular, but it is also central to its genesis, too. Second, Bedouins are born poets, and like most poets and people who enjoy poetry, they make heavy use of metaphors to express themselves. Here’s Wikipedia (sorry) on the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’: Metaphor…
This is the second item in the series on rare, uncommon Arabian horse strains, after the strain of Hazqan Misrabi, featured earlier. This time I will mention the strain of Kuhaylan al-Shaykhan, feminine Kuhaylat al-Shaykhah. This is one of the most respected branches of Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz, and the Sba’ah tribe possessed a couple marabet from that strain. As far as I know, the last Kuhaylat al-Shaykhah mare in Arabia Deserta was with Dr. Iskander Kassis of Aleppo. I believe she came from the Sba’ah or the Fad’aan, like most of Kassis’ horses. Kassis was one of the Middle East’s foremost master breeders in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, and had a collection of the some of the rarest and most precious strains of desert-bred, asil, Arabian horses. Radwan Shabareq, who saw that mare in his youth, tells me she had the most elegant and fine neck he had seen on a mare. In the West, the strain is represented in the asil descendants of the desert-bred mare 60-Adjuse, imported by Mikhail Fadllallah al-Haddad to Babolna, Hungary. According to Haddad in his travel journals, she was bought from the “Anazeh El Sbaa Mseni (?)” tribe, her sire a “Kuhaylan Adjuze”, her dam a “Schecha”.…
I wrote the following the following for Al Khamsa Arabians III (2008), and I will be expanding on it to deal with other aspects of a hujjah over the following days: “Certificates of origin (singular hujjah, plural hujjaj) of horses written in the Arab world follow a clear and uniform pattern that seldom varies. The first part of these certificates is always a more or less extensive religious invocation that includes passages from the Qur’an (the Holy Book of Islam) and quotations of the Hadith (the approved and authenticated collections of the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam). In general, the shorter the religious preamble the greater the chance that the by a Bedouin and the greater the probablity that the horse was Bedouin-owned at the time of the sale. Conversely, the longer a greater the likelihood that the certificate is the work of a townsman. There are several reasons for this situation, and at least a few words may be said of these. First, Bedouins tend to be less pious, or at least to have a different kind of piety, than townsfolk. At the time these certificates were being written for Europeans and Americans, Bedouins were still…
The Beirut, Lebanon, race track built in 1910 was a rare piece of Levantine-Florentine architecture that was destroyed in 1982. The Baghdad, Iraq, race track was built in 1920. When the Bagdad racetrack was closed due to political upheavals in Iraq, horse racing in Beirut flourished. Many of the Iraqi racehorse owners began racing their horses in Beirut, where they spent the hot summer months. Iraqi horses began to come to Beirut in the end of the 1940’s. These horses were often from a different type than the desert Syrian horses who until then were a majority at the Beirut racetrack and the Iraqis began to win nearly every race. In 1953, Gilbert Asseily, the well-known journalist in charge of the horse racing section of the French speaking news paper “L’Orient” wrote an article with the title “Why Iraqi horses are beating our horses”, where he said: “these horses are from the progeny of the Anglo Arab “Tabib” and I suggest that they run in separate races”. Of course, nobody took his advice seriously and the Iraqi horse invasion amplified after 1958 when the new Iraqi military leader Abdul Karim Kassem closed the Baghdad racetrack. When in 1987 the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture, followed in 1990 by the Lebanese SPARCA…
The 1981 mare Bucolique (photos below) by the Tunisian stallion Besbes (Esmet Ali x Karaouia by Loubieh) out of Berthe (Irmak x Bassala by Masbout d.b.) is one of the last asil representatives of the highly regarded “B” line of the French government stud of Pompadour. The line traces back in tail female to Wadha, a desert-bred Jilfat al-Dhawi, bred by the Fad’aan and imported by the French government to Algeria in 1875. In France, this line was inaugurated by the importation of the Algerian asil mare Bassala (Masbout d.b. x Saponnaire by El Managhi d.b.) to Pompadour. Bassala produced three remarkable asil daughters: Belle de Jour (by the asil Iricho), Berthe (by the asil Irmak) and Bossa Nova (by Iricho), which Robert Mauvy held in very high regard. I wrote about Bossa Nova here. The second daughter, Belle de Jour in turn produced two daughters by Irmak: the bays Belkis and Bismilah, both of which went to preservation homes, with Jean-Claude Rajot and Adrien Deblaise, respectively. Both Jean-Claude and Adrien bred the line pure for a couple more generations during the 1980s and 1990s. The third Bassala daughter produced two daughters by Besbes: Best and Bucolique. The first one I…
Matthias prompted me to tally the asil tail males in the West, following the series of entries on asil tail females. I just did it, and it was even faster than I expected: 1) Zobeyni, Saqlawi Jadran, imported to Egypt around the 1850s and bred by the Fad’aan (‘Anazah). Update 2023: My recent book, “The Arabian Horses of Abbas Pasha; New Discoveries: The 1860 Abbas Pasha Sale List and Other Original Documents”, published in 2022 by Ansata Publications, showed that this Zobeyni sire line is very possibly a sire line to Abbas Pasha’s senior stallion Ghadir, a Saqlawi Jadran of the Simni strain, not to Zobeyni. 2) Saklawi I, a Saqlawi Jadran bred by Ali Pasha Sharif from original Abbas Pasha stock, likely to trace to other foundation stock of Abbas Pasha, possibly even Zobeyni or Ghadir. 3) Jamil El Kebir, Saqlawi Jadran, imported to Egypt around the 1880s and bred by the Fad’aan (‘Anazah) 4) El Deree, Saqlawi Sha’ifi, imported to Egypt around the 1920s and bred by the Jubur Bedouin tribe. 5) *Deyr, ‘Ubayyan Sharrak, imported to the USA in 1906, from the ‘Anazah. 6) *Muson, Kuhaylan al-Musinn, imported to the USA in 1906, from a line going…
If we add up the numbers of asil tail female in the four previous entries (Egyptian lines, in Europe, in the USA, and in South Africa), and remove the redundancies associated with the Rodania and Ghazieh lines that appear in both Egyptian and non-Egyptian breeding, we end up with 42 asil tail females in the “West”. Note: This number does not include North African, Saudi, Bahraini and Syrian lines which are more or less recent import to Western Countries. Note: There is nothing asil left from the old South American and Australian lines, so our survey of Western lines ends here.
In Keeping with the two previous entries, here are the non-Egyptian asil tail female lines remaining in South Africa today: Kuhaylan 1) Rodania, through Rosina (Saoud x Ruth by Bendigo), Kuhaylah Rudaniyah (branch of K. al-‘Ajuz), imported to the UK in 1881, bred by the Ruwalah (‘Anazah) 2) Freiha al-Hamra, through Barakah, Kuhaylan Mimrihiyah, imported to Egypt in the 1880s, and bred by the Fad’aan (‘Anazah)
I now realize that I’ve never listed tail female asil Arabian lines in the USA in one place before. I want to make up for this omission. As “Straight Egyptian” horses constitute the overwhelming majority of asil Arabians in this country (more than 95%??), I thought I’d list the Straight Egyptian female lines in a later blog entry. Here’s the list, by strain, and you can click on the name of the original mare to learn more about her: Kuhaylan: 1) *Nufoud, Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz, imported the USA in 1931, from the House of Saud. 2) *Reshan, Kuhaylah Hayfiyah (branch of al-‘Ajuz), imported to the USA in 1906, bred by the Fad’aan (‘Anazah) 3) Rodania, Kuhaylah Rudaniyah (branch of al-‘Ajuz), imported to the UK in 1881, bred by the Ruwalah (‘Anazah). 4) *Werdi, Kuhaylat al-Krush, imported to the USA in 1906, from a line originally tracing the Sba’ah (‘Anazah). 5) *Turfa, Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz, imported to the USA in 1941, from the House of Saud. Saqlawi: 6) Basilisk, Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah, imported to the UK in 1879, bred by the Sba’ah (‘Anazah) 7) Kariban, Saqlawiyah Jadraniyah, imported to Argentina in 1898, bred by the Ruwalah (‘Anazah) 8- *Urfah, Saqlawiyat al-‘Abd, imported to the USA in 1906, bred…
Recently, I was looking at the list of horses with a line or more to the 1911 Crabbet stallion Nureddin II (Rijm x Narguileh), and a quick look at his offspring led me to believe that there were none left who only traced to Al Khamsa-accepted foundation horses plus Nureddin II. In other words, I thought there were no living descendants of his which, if Nureddin II were ever to be accepted by Al Khamsa, could be added to the Al Khamsa Roster. I was wrong. They may two or three left. Some of the last otherwise Al-Khamsa-eligible Arabians with a line to Nureddin II traced to the ‘Ubayyah Sharrakiyah mare Laida and those of her descendants who were bred at Anchor Hill Stud, from the tail female of the desert-bred Davenport mare *Abeyah. These no longer have otherwise Al-Khamsa eligible offspring. But there is another line of horses that trace exclusively to Al Khamsa-accepted Arabians plus Nureddin II, and this one might have a handful descendants still living. This is the 1970 mare GC Faseema (Fa-Rousse x Raseema by Indrage out of Kaffa by *Sunshine), a Kuhaylah Hayfiyah tracing in tail female to the desert-bred mare *Reshan. Her grandsire,…
I am pleased to see Thea Isis featured on Edouard’s site and I could not resist offering a few more images of her. The first is of her in a pasture, the second is of Thea Isis in 1983 at Carol Lyon’s farm in the spring with her filly LD Abba Isis sired by the Babson stallion Ibn Mahrouf (Mahrouf x Serr Abba), and the third is a close up of her head from the second photo. I used this close up of Thea Isis’s head in my presentation in Minnesota on desert Arabian type because I wanted newcomers to appreciate how beautiful an Arabian can be with very little hint of a dished face. Note not only the beautiful large dark eye but the harmonious placement of the eye in relation to the ears and the nostrils. These are the “Chorus Girl” eyes that Homer Davenport wrote about. Thea Isis was a timelessly magnificent mare in the same way as the stallion Javera Thadrian also was. I also used his image in my Minnesota presentation because when one sees these images they first see the original magnificence of the traditional Arabian, the timeless look, without my even identifying the…
Nureddin II was born in 1911 at Crabbet Park in the UK. He was reported to have been sired by Rijm out of Narguileh, and thus a full brother to Nasik. He was bought by Roger Selby and exported to the USA in 1933. He was a big horse, measuring a full 16 hands, but again his recorded sire Rijm was just a trifle shorter at 15.3 hands. Nureddin II is not an Al Khamsa horse, even though both of his recorded parents are. It was said that Carl Raswan, the father of purist Arabian horse breeding in the USA, had access to information according to which Nureddin II’s dam Narguileh was bred to an English Thouroughbred stallion at Crabbet and that the resulting foal was Nureddin II. As a result, Nureddin II was not included as “Blue List” in Jane Ott’s Blue Arabian Horse Catalog, on which Raswan was a major influence, and a special “sublist” was created for him and his otherwise “Blue List” descendants: these horses were subsequently known as “sublist Nureddin”. Miss Ott actually encouraged breeders who were interested in preserving Nureddin’s type — which was a key component of the ‘Wentworth Superhorse’ bred at Crabbet…
I am excited because I finally found pictures of two asil mares I had never seen before: the two Kuhaylat al-Hayf sisters Iras (El Alamein x Portia by Tripoli) and HB Octavia (Ibn Alamein x Portia), both bred at Craver Farms and the founders of dynasties of their own within Davenport breeding in the USA. The photo of Iras below is reminiscent of a type of horses which some old-timers in Lebanon and Syria referred to as a “mares [suited] for kings” (faras muluk). I cannot find the words to describe this type, but it is usually associated with very long ears, a thin long neck, and a muzzle with very delicate nostrils, among other features, as well as an overall regal “poise” and expression, in which you could read some disdain for the insignificant human being they made you feel like as well as infinite feminity and kindness. We owned a desert-bred mare of the Rabdan strain from the Tai tribe that looked just like that.
There are basically two groups of Davenport mares of the Habdan strain. One group traces through the Trisarlah daughter Waddarlah, then to Bint Oberon, then to two daughters who bred on: DDA Hadba and DDA Shalaana. Bint Oberon’s third daughter, ACDS Bonne Jour, has had no foals. DDA Hadba (no longer producing) has one daughter, R L Boomerette. R L Boomerette has one daughter (location unknown), and Boomerette is now with with new Davenport breeders Gene and Chris Pluto. There is hope there. DDA Shalaana has two daughters, but they are in non-breeding homes. I am not certain of Shalaana’s status, but I believe she is deceased. The other branch is where you find the mare and filly from the picture: through the other Trisarlah daughter, Letarlah, and through her to two daughters, Antezzah and Jamila Wahid (descent through a third daughter, who was exported to Jordon, is presumed lost to the group). The daughters of Jamila Wahid may well be lost to the group as they are with an elderly breeder, and the future for those horses is quite uncertain (in my opinion). Several of Antezzah’s offspring also went abroad and are presumed lost to the group. One daughter, RL Kadbat Abril is,…
The first lesson I took from from the success of “Davenport” breeding in the USA is connectedness, and I talked about it in an earlier entry. Another lesson is that it’s a nice story that was also nicely told. The history of every single Arabian horse breeding group is equally fascinating: Egyptian Arabians and the splendor of the kings and pashas, Crabbet Arabians and the travels of Lady Anne Blunt against the backdrop of a British Empire at its zenith, etc. The history of the Davenports as a breeding group ranks among the most inspiring of these for several reasons: first and foremost, because of its extraordinary simplicity: one man, Homer Davenport, falls in love with desert-bred Arabian horses at the 1893 Chicago World Fair; he decides to own some of his own, so he jumps on a ship on the first occasion (in 1906), spends a few weeks in Northern Arabia and comes back to the USA with 27 of these coveted horses, but dies shortly after. Yet a hundred years later, the horses are still there, thanks to the foresight and fortitude of a small number of courageous individuals. It is a quintessentially American story of self-made men…
I am a relatively recent addition to the group of North American-based breeders of the Arabian horses known as “Davenport Arabians”, since I bought Wisteria CF in from Charles and Jeanne Craver in 2006. “Davenports” are a very special group of horses descending from the horses imported by Homer Davenport from the Northern Arabian desert in 1906 (some of them also trace to the horses which the Ottoman Empire sent to the 1893 Chicago World Fair). I am very fond of this group horses (and even more so of their ‘inventors’, the Cravers), although I don’t identify as a ‘Davenport breeder’, nor do I think of my horses as ‘Davenport horses’. I’d rather think of Wisteria CF, her daughter Wadha and the other mare I have an interest in, Javera Chelsea, as asil Kuhaylat mares tracing to the war horses of the Bedouin tribes of the Northern Arabian desert. As such, they are the same kind of “Syrian” horses as those my father and I used to own, before I came to the USA in 2000. That said, I think there are some lessons to be learnt from the group of “Davenport breeders” in recent years, i.e., since I have…
The first and only desert-bred Syrian stallion we ever owned. More on him later, as I dig up better photos. This one was taken in 1995 at the farm of Mustafa Jabri in Aleppo, where Dahess was standing at stud. My father is teasing him..
From now on, I will use the term “Pseudo-Arabian” to refer to horses that are registered as Arabians in a WAHO-approved studbook, but are in reality part-bred Arabians with varying amounts of non-Arabian blood running in their veins. They are part-breds in disguise. The Qatari horse Amer (by Wafi x Bushra on paper), the Saudi horse Tiwaiq (by Unknown 1 x Unkown 2 out of Unknown 3, photo below) and a majority of horses of French racing bloodlines such as Djourman (Manguier x Djouranta by Saint Laurent, photo below) fall under this category. They and their offspring are among the most expensive and sought after “Arabian” horses today. Their presence in WAHO-registered studbooks represents a scandal unlike any other in the world of equine breeding, in no small part because they belong to rich and powerful people who can get away with this behavior.
I think I just made a good bargain: a portable Pandigital photo scanner for 90 USD. It scans a photo in seconds, and the resolution, while not perfect, is quite decent. When I was studying in Chicago in 2001, Joe Ferriss offered me a state-of-the-art scanner which I used to scan the photos of the desert-bred Arabians that you see on this blog. Then I broke that scanner in 2004, and I have been using the same photos again and again since. Today, I scanned 76 horse photos in just a few minutes, most of them I took in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Syria, some of them from my trip to Tunisia in 2005 and the rest of France. So get ready for dozens of photos of Syrian desert-bred Arabians, and let me know when you have had enough.