Dating the origins of Arabian horse strains

I take special interest in the origin of Arabian horse strains. I am particularly keen on establishing the approximate dates when the main strains first came about. In the context of oral Bedouin culture, this can present obvious challenges.

Before the advent of modernization and mass literacy in the twentieth century, Bedouins did not assign numerical values to years the way literate societies did. They linked years to important events that took place in the same time period, e.g., “the year Sfug al-Jarba was murdered“. This was 1847, according to British spies’ cables to London.

The Abbas Pasha Manuscript helps resolving the dating problem to some extent. It features hundreds of pages of written testimonies from several dozen Bedouins. The preamble to the manuscript mentions a completion date in 1269 Hijri, which extends from November 1852 CE to October 1853 CE. This means that Abbas Pasha’s envoys to the tribe must have gathered their accounts in 1851 or 1852 at the latest. Incidentally, one of the accounts refers to “the year Sfug al-Jarba was murdered” (1847) in the recent past, so the accounts must have been collected in or after 1848. A date of 1850 is therefore a good estimate, especially that gathering accounts across Arabia, from Mesopotamia in the North to Yemen in the South, must have taken more than one year.

Events in the Bedouin accounts reported in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript can be dated in two ways. The first is by trying to find references to the same events in written records, like 1847 for “the year Sfug al-Jarba was murdered“. The second is by counting generations of people, starting from 1850 backwards. The standard calculation is that three generations equal a hundred years, or 33 years per generation.