Category: General

My beloved Wadha nearly died while foaling, and her foal by Monologue died too. A large bay colt, both hindlegs white, so large that he was stuck at the level of his hips for two and a half hours and died before he could come out. Wadha’s vagina was teared up pretty bad and she did not pass her placenta until several hours after she was rushed to the vet hospital of the U. of Pennsylvania. She remains there, but is doing better now. It was traumatic. It reminds of me of the note Lady Anne Blunt put in her herdbook about her Jallabiyah mare Makbula: “Foal dead, mare nearly dead”.  

Lovas Nemzet, Laszlo Kiraly’s 22 years old Hungarian horse magazine is having its annual photo competition. The deadline is July 24, 2022. Everyone is encouraged to apply.  

The last thing I wanted this year is another colt. Still, my appreciation for this latest one is growing at each candid shot Terry Doyle sends me through DeWayne Brown, who owns the dam. Look at that neck, that gaskin and these hocks, at such a young age. Bashir is really a good sire. I fancy the lines to *Mirage, *Euphrates, *Shahwan and *Al-Mashoor way in the back of the pedigree, and more closely, the cross to *Faleh and of course the Doyle blood. I have the highest respect for the influence of *Faleh and his full brother *Farazdac in any pedigree. Just a drop of that blood makes a huge difference (likewise with their maternal uncle *Aswan).

I finally managed to get a better photo of Assad Princess Surrayah.  Please excuse the candid photo.  She’s  putting  weight on  nicely. Assad Princess Surrayah She will be put out to pasture with Gülilah Sawwan very soon.

I like this little chap. He speaks well for his sire as a breeding stallion. The dam is of course excellent.

Wadha’s foal by Monologue is due this week, and Pippa’s foal by Bashir (“the Dude”) the next. I am hoping for a bay foal in the first case, regardless of gender, and for a filly (chestnut, because no other option) in the second. Both should be nice foals, if delivery goes all. In other news, Belle is in foal to Jamr again.

My new book with Kate McLachlan and Moira Walker, “The Arabian Horses of Abbas Pasha” will be published in late-July 2022, capping six years of work. It is based on the (re)discovery and translation of the Abbas Pasha Sale List, an original Arabic document drawn at the close of the auction sale of the famed collection of Arabian horses of Abbas Pasha I, Viceroy of Egypt and the Sudan (r. 1848-1854), following the sudden death by drawning of his son Ibrahim Ilhami Pasha, who had inherited his father’s horses and bred them them on for six more years. The Sale List has 278 stallions, mares, colts and fillies, excluding very young foals at their dams’ side. The new book also features translations of six other smaller documents, including an early scrapbook of Ali Pasha Sherif, and two entries from his studbook, which is now lost. Taken together, the Abbas Pasha Sale List and the six smaller documents translated and analyized in this book allow us to fill in blanks in the pedigrees of the horses which Lady Anne and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt acquired from Ali Pasha Sherif between the 1889 and 1896. These horses traced entirely to Abbas Pasha stock…

Kate and I started talking about the mare Sidi Bint Maistro a while ago. I finally summoned up the nerve to get my 2 cents together and make an offer for her. Who was the first horse you bought?

This photo from Mirko Ulram at Yeguada Schieferegg this morning. Their third foal and first filly. Both mom and daughter are doing well. sired by Ibn Hamza out of Hassirah

This is considered beautiful by some.    

The other day I was telling Carrie Slayton that I wanted to breed and own very powerful Arabian horses horses, with very deep girths, very round barrels, short backs, long hips, high and extended withers, flamboyant action, lots of spirit, fire in the eyes, dark skin on the face, very fine skin, shiny coats, masculine males, feminine females, very dry overall. And of course of unquestionably pure origins.

Just about a year ago I wrote about the mare Jezabel , “die Wüstenstute” and her journey from Iran to Europe. Mirko Ulram graciously sent me these photos of her great-granddaughter Jasminah. She is the product of a mating between a grandson and a granddaughter of Jezabel. Mirko confirmed that the pedigree is correct. (AllBreedPedigree can sometimes be… entertaining, shall we say?) The photos are from last summer.

This document is a milestone, and it took a year to get it this far, in a true collective effort.

… and I did not even celebrate it. Shame on me. The young girl after which this website is named was born on the day it was launched, and is now a teenager (left on the photo).  

This horse is actually Montezuma (Sir x Tara), a Kuhaylan Hayfi of Davenport lines that was mostly used to produce half-Arabs.

First time I see a photo of this mare. She was beautiful. I wish that her type had prevailed in these *Turfa horses. She was 44% *Turfa.    

I usually try to follow these news, but this one escaped me: a cuneiform inscription — 26 lines, the longest discovered in Saudi Arabia so far — along with a stone relief of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, was discovered this past July in the ancient Central Arabian town of Fadak, south of Hail*. So far the best known representation of Nabonidus was in that in Harran Stela (below), which features him along the effigies of the moon-god Sin, the winged sun-god Shamash, and the  goddess of Venus, Ishtar. The snake must refer to either Nabu or Marduk. Why Nabonidus (the wikipedia article is good) left his son to co-rule in Babylon and established his residence at Tayma in Central Arabia, remains a matter of debate. Some specialists say he went there to control the South Arabian trade routes, which forked at Taymaa — one road went to Syria and the Mediterranean cost and the other to Mesopotamia. Others say he was exiled there by the religious elite, who did not appreciate his attempts at religious reform, above all how he tried to put the moon god Sin atop the Babylonian pantheon. Soon after his return to Babylon, the elite…

I grew up reading Lady Wentworth’s massive book “The Authentic Arabian Horse” as well as Robert Mauvy’s little book “Le Cheval Arabe”. I had a great deal of trust in the first, and the second was bedtime reading for me for many years.  Both books featured intriguing mentions of an Arabic legend about “Hoshaba” and “Baz”,  a pair of free-roaming wild horses in Yemen that were tamed by Biblical characters of same name (?), becoming the ancestors of today’s Arabian horses.  Baz was supposed to be the female progenitor and Hoshaba the male one. The legend, according to both Wentworth and Mauvy, led credence to the belief that the Arabian horse was indigenous to the Arabian peninsula from time immemorial. I remember searching for both characters in the Bible and not finding anything remotely related, but still trusting the authorities’ word on it.  A cursory Google search for the “Wild Mare of Baz” shows that, from the “Horse Encyclopedia” and “The Story of America’s Triple Crown” to the “Ultimate Guide to Horse Breeds”, the legend of Hoshaba and Baz is alive and well in recent mainstream equine literature, having spread well beyond Arabian horse books. See here for instance:   …

In the French “Journal des Haras” much is said about the French Government missions to purchase Arabian stallions (and sometimes a couple of mares) during the 19th century. Although private initiatives may have occurred before, the first and oldest record I have found so far is the breeding program of Count of Tocqueville, with a strong emphasis on purebred Arabian breeding. The Count of Tocqueville was then owning the castle of Gueures in Normandy (photo above). Besides being involved in his earlier years in Arabian horse breeding, he also held in Gueures, the first racing events that would lead to the famous Dieppe City’s Racing Events in Normandy. The Count owned also talented Thoroughbred horses but he is likely one of the very first horsemen of his area to purposely create a separate breeding program focused on Arabian horses. By the late 1820’s he had managed to secure a group of Arabian mares and stallions. He thought of them as a “superior quality” compared to the oriental ancestors of the English Thoroughbreds and possessed “authentic titles” certifying their origins (probably some hujjaj which are left to be found!). Let me introduce them to you, translating their review in a 1828…

Finally, a photo of Shaykh Ahmad al-Taha, leader of the Juhaysh tribe in Northern Iraq. The Juhaysh were a large sheep-herding tribe. The belong to the larger Zabid confederation, which migrated northwards from Yemen to the Euphrates valley some 500 year ago. Only the leaders of the tribe kept horses. The Juhaysh had two main strains: Kuhaylan Da’jani (of which the RAS El Nasser, bred by Ahmad al-Taha, was the best known representative) and Hadban al-Malali. They also had a Dahman ‘Amir strain, which I think they got either from their Shammar or their Jubur neighbours. The leaders of a Juhaysh peasant subtribe, the Bu Mutaywit, owned a strain of Shuwayman Sabbah which is they got from the Jarba Shammar in the early 1900s. This is the strain of the stallion al-Khaldi, who is now in most Syrian pedigrees.

I am sure many of you have alreay seen the piece Yasser Ghanim al-Tahawi recently wrote for the Kuwaiti Bait Al-Arab’s magazine. Yasser has emerged as one of most precise and boldest thought leaders on the subject of the identity of the Arabian horse. Scroll down to the end of the pdf for the piece.  

I feel very comfortable with Jamr‘s head, because of the combination of the straight profile, the small muzzle, and the deep jowls. I think one needs to see beyond the flashy, in-your-face, provocative, even disturbing “beauty” of present day heads of Arabian horses of the showring kind, with its exaggerated features. One instead needs to learn to look at the proportions and the interrelation of all the individual elements of the head together. A relaxing sense of harmony needs to prevail, one that draws you in, and makes you want to look longer, and look slower.

A mes lecteurs francais: je vous conseille vivement ce livre, auquel j’ai eu le plaisir de contribuer il y a quelques annees: Homer Davenport’s Quest of the Arabian Horse. Les images sont superbes et les annotations tres documentees.

Barakah is now 5. I think she may have more growing (and widening) to do. She is 95% Davenport (four generations of Davenport stallions on top) but she looks nothing like full-Davenport horses. She is leggier, and differently balanced, with flatter bone. She has her sire’s drooping quarter (when moving this does not show). Pity she did not inherit her dam’s beautiful level croup, highly set tail, extra-long ears or blood mark. There may also be a looser coupling than either sire or dam, and I am not sure where that came from, or if it’s here to stay. Still, she has her sire’s deep girth and his broad chest. Overall, her build is an improvement over her dam’s, and I believe the line is now ready to be crossed with Monologue CF, who will bring extra balance. Like her dam, she has a lot of style, and a “dry”, “deserty” look.  

I went to see the horses a few days ago. They looked wonderful. The younger ones have finally matured into what I was expecting of their bloodlines. I felt so vindicated, in terms of the breeding decisions I took over the past decade. I had remained uncertain about these decisions until recently. Jamr, albeit small, looks magnificent. I waited almost ten years before seeing him mature into his current state. He is very masculine and tightly build; he has the deepest of jowls; a small muzzle; a naturally arched neck; a very broad forehead; large, prominent, bony eye sockets, and a straight profile — the way I like it in stallions. And he moves with so much power and style. When I remember Lady Anne Blunt’s quote ““A straight profile should not be a defect if the forehead is very broad, the eyes placed low and very large, and the muzzle small”, it’s him that I have in mind.

A very good endurance riding friend of ours is sending her mare to visit Gülilah Sawwan , the last living SE son of the German import Mahib. Assad Princess Surrayah is sired by the noted endurance sire (and all around sweetheart) Sidi el Nabiel out of the Maistro[imp] daughter Sidi Halima. She’s not exactly a spring chicken, but we’re hoping for the best. Helping to save the Mahib[imp] line for asil breeding out of a Freiha Al-Hamra (APK) tail female mare could have been worse. Assad Princess Surrayah

From the 1936 book of Dr. Ahmad Mabrouk of the Royal Agricultural Society of Egypt, “Rihlah ila Bilad al-‘Arab”, comes this picture of a stallion of King Abd al-‘Aziz Aal Saud at the al-Kharj stud in Najd. Arabian horse fans would do well to carefully study the horse in this picture: he was the senior stallion in the senior stud of the most senior person in Arabia at the time.  You’re looking at the archetype of the breed in its native homeland. Note the power, length and slope of the shoulder, the pointy ears, prominent withers and the length of hip. Note the straight profile and the strong neck. Neither swan necks nor extreme dished profiles were not a thing. Ten years later, in 1946, the archetype at al-Kharj did not look much different.

This video sent along by Talal Farah shows a race held in Bahrain between a part-bred Arab horse from Lebanon and a Bahraini mare owned by the Bahraini ruler. The part-bred, a grey owned by famous racehorse owner Mahmud Fustuq, is Bahr al-Hadi, who sired a good deal of the Lebanese part-breds. He was very handsome. The Bahraini mare is a Kuhaylah Jallabiyah.  See how she overtook him in the long run, after he led on a short distance.

In the same vein as the photos of lesser-known Crabbet horses which Kate re-published below, here is a photo of Rasim (Feysul x Risala, born 1906) from the December 1933 edition of the French magazine Le Sport Universel Illustre, with a nice description of him in French. The photo was taken during a visit of the author of the article to the Ujazd stud of Baron William Bicker in present-day Poland. Baron Bicker had purchased the 18 year old stallion from Lady Wentworth in 1924 for a very large sum.    

Today I found the following note in the 1935 book of Prince Mohammed Ali. It is an excerpt from the Abbas Pasha Manuscript (or one of its drafts), on a mare of the Jilfan Dhawi strain acquired by Abbas Pasha: The intensely black Jilfah Dahwa mare of the Fid’an, owned by Nasir al-Wayil of Shammar, came into the possession of Nasir from the Tawman of Shammar. The Tawman got it from the Fid’an. Its mother is still in the possession of Shammar and its father is the black Mu’niqi Hadraji of the horses of the Tawman of Shammar. The mare was acquired by its (present) owner through purchase. Just noting that this is the same marbat as that of the mare Wadha, a Jilfat Dhawi bought by a French government commission from a Fad’aan camp in 1875, and sent to Algeria, where she founded a famous damline.

روى سليمان العزو السليمان الفيحان من قبيلة الشرابين تجاوز الستين من العمر عن تاريخ قدوم الخلّاوية الى أهله قال: درجت الخلّاوية الى جد أبي اسمه فيحان منذ ما يقارب 180 عام من اعنزا حيث حدثت مشاجرة بين الرعاة من اعنزا والشرابين على المراعي حوالي منطقة جبل سنجار وفي هذه المشاجرة أُصيب رجل من الشرابين وبعد سنة توفّي متأثراً بهذه الاصابة فاصبح الرعاة من الشرابيين يشاجرون اي اعنزي في تلك المنطقة لعلهم يجدون القاتل فيأخذون بالثأر فأرسلوا اعنزا وفد جاهة لفض هذا الخلاف وبالفعل تم دفع الديّة لذوي المقتول وكان سيّدهم وشيخهم فيحان وبعد دفع الديّة اهدوا فيحان فرس وقالوا له (( دير بالك عليها تراهي الخلّاوية وهي فرع من كحيلة العجوز )) واعطوه حجة يشهدون بها أنّها أصيلة وفحلها من الخيل الشبوّة { للأسف لم نجد الحجة } ونمتْ هذه الفرس عند فيحان وبعد فترة بسيطة وُلدَ سليمان الفيحان بتاريخ 1842 تقريباً توفي 1951 عاش قُرابة مائة وعشرة سنين عندما كبر سليمان اهتم بالخيل كثيراً فأعطاه والده وهو فتى صغير فرس أو فرسين قبل زواجه. وهو الوحيد الذي حافظ على هذه الخيل وانقطعت عند باقي اهله واقربائهوعاد ووزع عليهم من خيله فاستمرت عند حفيده سليمان العزو الفيحان صاحب (( الراوي )) وجوديف الحمود واخوانه يطلق عليهن اسم خلاويات الفيحان ومدرجات…

Fawaz al-Rajab passed away last week. The news of his passing saddened me greatly, perhaps because he was directly connected to my family’s story with horses. Fawaz was one of Syria’s very last hassanah, (in Arabic حصانة, “men of horses”). Part merchants, part experts, part brokers, part stallion handlers, but never breeders nor owners, the hassanah lived for and from the horses. They were one’s first point of contact when buying,  selling or inquiring about a horse. They knew the landscape like nobody else. Abu Hussein Khattab and Abd al-Qadir Hammami were the main hassanah of Aleppo. Uqlah al-Hanshul and Najm al-Himmayri were the main two for Deyr al-Zor. They all passed. Today, with the rise of direct advertising, social media, and specialty magazines, there is no room for the hassanah anymore. The profession is a thing of the past. Fawaz was the main such “man of horses” for the Syrian city of Homs from the 1960s to the 2010s. He took over his father’s business. In 1976, my father, then newly engaged to my mother, made his first visit to her family in Homs. He asked his future in-laws where he could see horses around the city. My uncle…

Register here to attend, if you can.

  وقعت عيناي على حجة باسم جهيم المطخان يفيد بها ان ام الفحل الشهير كروش جهيم المعروف باسمه هي كروش محمد النواف الجربا مما يعني ان كروش جهيم يرد الى فرس علي العبد الرزاق الجربا التي وردت مع امه العمشة اثر رجوعها من حائل حيث اقامت عدة سنوات في ضيافة ابن رشيد وقد اتى ابن رشيد بالكروش من الدويش شيوخ مطير

This interesting 2019 article from Aramco Expat is an obituary of sorts for John Ames, an early (pre-World War II) Aramco employee. He was the husband of Dr. Esther Ames, who imported the Ubayyah mare *Mahraa and her daughter *Muhaira to the USA. The following exceprt struck me: John was married to Esther – Esther Ames MD.  As the only American woman doctor in Aramco, she spent a fair amount of time in Riyadh tending to the women of the royal family: the dowagers, the princesses and their daughters. She was a great favorite and was showered with elaborate hand-embroidered dresses, finely worked brass coffee pots, silk scarves and the like. Sometimes Emir Saud bin Jiluwi, the governor and most powerful man in eastern Saudi Arabia, would send his personal black Cadillac and two bodyguards to take her to his palace. John even managed to get a blade out of the connection when some grateful prince sent him a curved, eight-inch dagger in a beautiful jet black scabbard filigreed in fine gold-plated wire. Surely, if Dr Ames, the only American female doctor in East Arabian, had attended to the wealth of the wives, sisters or daughters of Saud Ibn Jalawi,…

This handsome stallion, a personal favorite of mine, born in 1988, is the sire of the flee-bitten Kuhaylat Ibn Mizhir mare that many of you liked in the entry below. He was one of the last stallions the Tai Bedouins used as a herdsire, in the village of al-Na’em, where some Tai had settled. This earned him the nickname “Krush al-Na’em”. His sire was a Hamdani Ibn Ghurab of the Tai, sired by a Dahman Amer of ‘Ajil al-Yawir al-Jarba, the Shammar. His dam’s sire was the Ma’naqi Hadraji of Zahir al-Ufaytan, and the sire of the  maternal grand dam — is said to have been a Kuhaylan Krush. The maternal grand-dam is from the horses of Mutlaq al-Haybah of the Shammar.