Do we say “Arab horse” or “Arabian horse”?
Much ink has been spilled on this subject, and I guess the short answer to the question is that one can say both.
“Arabian” refers to “Arabia” the land, like “English” does to “England”. When one says “Arabian horse”, they link the horse to “Arabia” the land. When one says “Arab horse”, they link the horse to the “Arab” people.
“Arabia” the land and “Arab” the people are related, because “Arabia” is how the Romans called the “lands of the Arabs”. The term was carried over from Latin to other European languages. So you’d think that the difference does not really matter, because both “Arabian horse” (the horse of/from the “land of the Arabs”) and “Arab horse” (the horse of/from the Arabs”) eventually go back to “Arab” in the end.
But “Arabia” and “Arab” are not exclusively related: not all the people who ever inhabited (or still inhabit) Arabia were (are) Arab. Persians, Hebrews and Ethiopians did live there too. So did a lot of non-Arab ancient people who were native to Arabia. Of these, the Sabaeans of Queen of Sheba fame are the best known today.
Personally, I would go for “Arab horse”, although I have used both terms on this blog. My opinion is that the horse is intimately linked to the Arab people. I believe the two are inseparable. I also believe that the connection of the horse to the Arab people is much stronger than its connection to the land of Arabia. Ibn al-Kalbi (died 819 AD) already spoke of “khuyul al-arab“, the “horses of the Arab”.
Who the Arabs are/were; who is/isn’t an Arab; was that related to language, ethnicity, way of life, place of living, color of skin, religion, or some or all of the above; and how that changed over time (because it has changed a lot), are a much more complex set of questions. For example: could one be Arab and black? could one be Arab and Jewish? could one be Arab and not speak Arabic, the language? Here and here are two recent academic books on the subject of Arab identity.
Back to horses: there are fundamental questions about whether the horse breed is older than the people it is named after, and whether it came from other people. There are also questions about whether the breed came from outside the land and when. There are also other important questions about whether the people called themselves Arab, or were called Arabs by others, before or after they had the horses. These are fascinating, and in my opinion, still open questions.
For a brain-stretching and fun analogy, the “English” are the people of “England”, the land. “England” is the “land of the Engles/Angles”, a Germanic people who gave their name to the land. But not all the English are/were Angles. There were Celts, Danes, Saxons, Jutes, Romans and others living in England. So compare “English” with “Arabian”, “England” with “Arabia” and “Arab” with “Angle”. Now would you say an “English Thoroughbred” or an “Angle Thoroughbred”? An “English muffin” or an “Angle muffin”? Why? It depends on whether the English Thoroughbred or the English muffin were invented by the Angles or not… but the answer to these questions is clear.
I am going to digress briefly to make the absolutely irresistible and thus oft-repeated observation that, had it not been for scholars like the Venerable Bede, who punned on Angli and angeli, and the kings who claimed the title of cyning angelcynnes, there would be an island called Sexland, whose inhabitants spoke Sexish, and we would be talking of the Sexish Thoroughbred and Sexish muffin. (The original a vowel in Saexe ‘Saxons’ shifted to e, giving us, for example, Essex from Eastsaexe.)
It certainly is interesting to reflect on the different nuances of Arabian and Arab, and I think that I agree with your view that the Arab horse is defined by its association with the Arab people, and not necessarily by its geographic location. The more I read and learn about the Arab horse, the more I feel its identity is tied to and shaped by the people who bred it, and as they were nomadic (or is the right word transhumant?), the horses moved with them too, into and out of Arabia, whether that is the modern state with its current boundaries, or the peninsula.
I suppose also, if it were a purely geographic description, then there would not have been the distinction between asil, atiq on the one hand and kadish, hajin, birdhawn on the other, because a horse could be one of the last three and found in Arabia.
I find this very funny.
Edouard – it is such a delight to see this posting. For the decades I’ve been interested in the Arabian horse, I’ve pondered the questions – “what constitutes an Arabian horse” and “when did the Arabian horse become a _breed_?”. With the Y chromosome research that has become available over the past several years (and with the next batch of DNA publications to come out), I’m chewing on these questions even more. Your comments blend in beautifully with many of the thoughts kicking around my head and I especially appreciate the book recommendations.
Hopefully, by the end of 2019 or early 2020, I’ll be able to start sharing a project I’m working on.
Edouard, Kate, I enjoyed both the post and your comments. And Beth, now you really have me sitting up and pricking my ears!
And here I thought the difference was between British and American usage.
Sexish muffin FTW!
Somehow I missed Kate’s post – love it! And Jeanne, as I piece this thing together, I may be able to drop some hints along the way. 🙂
Loved this post <3 soooo very much 😉
Yes Arabian but not always Arab 😀 !!!
I see this is a question asked by many! I remember pondering this a good while back when I was just starting to think about the lineations between Arab people and Arabian horses.
I had personally chosen to go with Arab people and Arabian horses, because as you’ve said, Arab is such a broad identity for people, and not all Arabs are involved with the Arabian horse and their history. A simplistic example might be: all Bedu are Arabs, but not all Arabs are Bedu. To my ever-evolving understanding, the Arabian horse began in the cradle of the Arabian peninsula, and that is just as significant as the ties to Arab peoples. But I guess I’ve also stacked quite a few assumptions for that term:
— Arab denotes people, and there is something uncomfortable for me about calling both horses and people Arabs, which likely stems from some very racist readings I’ve undertaken wherein European travellers consider the Arabs to be lesser, barbaric, uncultured, uncivilized, etc, etc, etc. The European texts from the 18th, 19th, and even 20th centuries tend to use “Arab horse,” replete with stereotypes and dubious mythology. There’s a lot to unpack re: European conceptualization of racial identity and environmental determinism as applied to Arab peoples and their horses.
— Arabian horse is synonymous with asil horse, which is irrevocably linked with the people who bred them. Even Europeans were able to grasp that: Kochlani, high-caste, etc. Perhaps we ought to return to this vein of distinction.
With that said: Arabian has such a complicated connotational usage now. Arabian in the sense of the West. Arabian in the definition of the WAHO. Arabian in the sense of purebred, part-bred, vs authentic, kadish. It seems a perennial struggle to adequately determine just how to differentiate the different concepts of what makes an Arabian horses.
Definitely food for the thought. Thank you.
Moira, what you are also assuming is that “Arab people” meant the same thing over the course of 17 centuries or so. Today, an Arab person is someone who speaks Arabic as her mother tongue. The person can be an Egyptian of 100% “Pharaonic”/preislamic Egyptian heritage, or a Moroccan of 100% Berber/Amazigh heritage, she would qualify as “Arab” today. This extensive definition is a legacy of Arab nationalism, an early 20th century concept. In the time of Ibn al-Kalbi, when he was speaking of the “Horse of the Arab” (8th century CE), “Arab” basically meant “Bedouin”. The meaning of the term ebbed and flowed between these two ends of the spectrum in the 11 century in between. What is meant to before the time of Ibn al-Kalbi is an open question, still debated (including “Shamsi, Queen of the Arabs” and “Jindibu the Arab” in the Assyrian texts of the 8th century BCE.
@ Edouard, I have to disagree that in the 8th c Arab meant Bedouin. Ibn al Kalbi & co actively created that connotation but linguistic and archeologic evidence show that such is not the case until our early islamic writers start claiming so. It is very clearly laid out in both academic publications you shared, that Bedouin is most definitely not synonymous to Arabs in that period, and that it is an islamic construct to tie the two together, only consolidating from the 9th c onwards 🙂
@ Moira, the statement that all Bedu are Arab is untrue. Not ethnically, not semantically, not culturally etc. A vast amount of academic literature is emerging on this topic, exiting development! Also, Arabian horse is most definitely not synonymous to Asil horse. Both are concepts that develop separately in history.
love this discussion!
@Hylke: so when he says “khuyul al-arab” who are the arab?
Take this with a hefty grain of salt, as I’m still learning a good deal about the history of the region and its peoples, but my thought here is: while it is a good idea to deconstruct colonial/imperial/outsider mythology as pertains to the Arabian Horse, what I suspect matters most is whether or not Bedouins considered themselves Arab.but I’m happy to admit I dont know enough to really be educated on the subject and need to expand my education.
My other query/thought process here is: ethnicity is fluid. A lot if my assumptions are built along more modern lines, but, and bear with me, my thought becomes, if we are to presume that Bedouins were not always Arabs, and that the particulars if their identity have shifted over the centuries, what is it that ties it all together? The continuing arc of their culture and the region they live in? Bedouin itself, to my understanding, essentially denotes that they are a desert dwelling people. Their’s is a way of life that is shaped by a region and a type of land within that region, and that does semantically kind of tie me back to the Arab vs Arabian nomenclature with the additional question of: can “Arabian” tie numerous centuries of history, even pre-Arab, pre-Islamic Bedouin history, together in a way that is at all cohesive?
Lastly – if not Arab, if not Arabian? Strains? We can read in a lot of early European texts that they are all Kuhaylan. Kochlani, Koheil, Kahlani, etc.
In a discussion Kate and I had about it, she said: “If you want to know if something is an “Arab” horse (assumptive that we are talking about the asil horses), you ask for its strain.” You dont ask if it’s an Arab. It’s certainly marked how in Lady Anne’s Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, we see over and over again that the horses are not identified as Arabs, but by their strains.
And with that all said… I would ideally like more people who are Bedouin or Arab to chime in, though. Won’t lie, having a bunch of Westerners who are neither spout ideas at you (Edouard) does niggle uncomfortably.
@ Edouard: muslims 🙂 that’s the idea of the emerging literature of the time, underlining the islamic character of the Arab, and the bedouin past is a mere retrojected inclusion at that point.
@ Moira: the recent studies (the ones linked above) of early arab identity are all based entirely on arabic material, not westerners digging up some stones and assuming Arabians everywhere 😉 And current ongoing research is definitely including the “arab”voice in all this partly being carried out by Arabs, for the first time in history it seems. Exiting stuff. Also the same is happening for Berber identity, a very good publication came out very recently.
Bedouin is a label that does not have its own ethnogenesis. Its always put on certain groups of people, while these people already had identities and even a social hierarchy including labels for themselves! (you will also find info on pre Islamic Ma’add in those referenced studies)
Arabian and Arab are two very well defined terms within academia and they are not applicable to one another. Arabian cannot make history for arab identity issues cohesive no.
But your last remark is something I have observed too, Bedouin rarely call their horse Arab unless a foreigner asks if they think their horse is Arab. The bedouin horse classification system is not breed based but perhaps indeed strain based. Research has shown that we have to contextualise the historic value of the genealogical system based on memory studies, after all, most humans don’t remember generations of huge families, whether its horses or people. But I think the emerge and development of the strain system is worth a second look, as Raswan sold it short, basing it on Eurocentric ideas of purity and horse classification by racial boundaries defined as breeds.
@Hylke: Yes to that: “Bedouin rarely call their horse Arab unless a foreigner asks if they think their horse is Arab. The bedouin horse classification system is not breed based but perhaps indeed strain based.”
and yes to that: “I think the emerge and development of the strain system is worth a second look, as Raswan sold it short, basing it on Eurocentric ideas of purity and horse classification by racial boundaries defined as breeds.”
I have been trying to do that second look for two decades, and it will take two more decades.
Hylke, what is the latest scholarship on the Namara inscription (safely dated to 328 CE), specifically: “King of the Arabs”. I haven’t followed up since Bellamy’s new translation in 1985, but I thought the translation “King of the Arabs” was secure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namara_inscription
Why don’t we check what the Arabs themselves thought, did they consider it Arabian or Arab! 🙂 The Arabs never called their land Arabia, and never defined any borders to it. They always tried to expand to Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt. They gave names to many areas they lived in like Najd, Hejaz, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, but not Arabia. So there was no such expression in their language as Arabian Horse. They used the term Eraab instead which is a very unique word that gives even a third option to Arabian and Arab. The word is a plural form that has very unique drivation. The singular form is often considered the word Arab, but the Arab people rarely used this singular form for their horses. My understanding of how the term Eraab is derived is that the Arab people considered their horses just as Arabs as them. They didn’t consider the horses attributed to them as people nor to their land, but rather as originally Arab all the way long from the beginning! So the Arabs are not more Arab than their horses, they both came to existence together as Arabs!! I am not talking archeology or anthropology here. I am just talking from a cultural perspective and from my understanding of the Arabic language and literature.
“Arab people considered their horses just as Arabs as them. They didn’t consider the horses attributed to them as people nor to their land, but rather as originally Arab all the way long from the beginning! So the Arabs are not more Arab than their horses, they both came to existence together as Arabs.”
Yasser, this is my understanding too, in terms of how they perceived their horses. The legend of Ishmael taming the horses points to that. It says that the horses were called “Arab” because Ishmael was tamed them and he was the first Arab”.
In her research Hylke is asking when they started perceiving them they way you say they perceived them? Was it in Jahihilya? in early Islam? in later periods?
@ Edouard: The Namara inscription is fascinating. Discussion is whether or not it is in fact arabic. Most scholars agree that it is phonetically one of the earliest examples of what was to become known as Classical Arabic. However written in the Nabatean script of Arameic.
it does indeed contain the phrase MLK ‘L’RB KLH, but that is not Arabic correct grammar so we are facing a grammatical problem. dr. Webb also discusses issues with ‘RB in non Arabic languages in his work above and shows how semantically this does not mean Arab as defined in Arabic, rather outsiders as in “those who aren’t like us” (us being Ma’add, and later Muslims)
This conclusion that the phrase means to denote Imru’u al-Qays as the king of all ‘outsiders’ of a certain topographical area has earlier been proposed by dr Zakaria Mohammed(2015) who showed it to be an issue of borders with the roman border in Syria called Limes Arabicus, showing again that the label was not selfimposed.
Also, there are grave complications with the name Imru’u al-Qays himself, and various scholars have proposed that he is not the same protagonist that is being hailed in the Arabian horse literature as the name in the inscription is Amruu al-Qays when properly vocalised, so not the same as the celebrated poet, ive seen the two confused many times. (see also Zakaria Mohammed (2015)and Ahmad al Jallad (2019))
What I find most interesting in this inscription is the fact that the pre-Islamic identity Ma’add is present. That is in fact a selfimposed identity of pre-Islamic tribes!
What translation are you using? Dussaud (1902) or James Bellamy (1985)? or a newer one?
What about the name of the Roman emperor Philip “the Arab”? Did Arab also mean outsider here? He was a native of Shahbaa in Arabia Petraea, within the Limes Arabicus.
Also, I am not aware of any serious dicussion about whether this king and the famous poet by same name are one and the same, there is about 200 years of difference. Yes, Ma’add is mentioned, and Nizar and Assad.
Kropp (1993) and Mohammed (2015).
Philip the Arab came from the place Romans named Arabia, there is no racial connotation.
But it would have been Arabicus (from Arabia) not Arabus. His name links him to a group, not a place.
Thank you for joining in the discussion, Yasser! I’ve not come across Eraab before – am I correct in understanding that Arab is a singular derived from backformation from Eraab? (Like the English pea comes from the original pease being reanalysed as a plural.)
Re Philip the Arab, I went off to see what I could find in the ancient sources. We have information on him in the late fourth century Epitome de Caesaribus, attributed to Aurelius Victor (but probably not by him), but it says very little about him, and does not mention his birth place.
Zosimus, the late fifth century historian, writes in Greek, and says (1.18.3) that Philip hormomenos gar ex Arabias, ethnous cheiristou “he came from Arabia, of the worst people” (my Greek is about four hundred years out of date for this, so pardon inaccuracies in the translation). At this point ethnos I think usually refers to “barbarian nations”; cheiristos literally means “worst”, but also has the sense of “mean” in the sense of “inferior”, “poor”. I also checked the dictionary entry for Arabia, and the oldest citation is in Herodotus, so I after this, I will be off to see what Herodotus calls Arabia.
At any rate, Zosimus mentions Arabia again, while discussing the campaigns of Septimius Severus. He says that when Severus marched against the Persians, he took Ctesiphon and Babylon, diadramon de tous skenitas Arabas kai pasan Arabian katastrepsamenos “overrunning the tent-dwelling Arabes and subduing all Arabia” (1.8.2). Embellishment of Severus’ accomplishments, or a limited definition of Arabia?
Earlier than Zosimus is Eusebius, who talks about Philip in his Ecclesiastical History, but again, like the author of the Epitome, he does not mention his birthplace. He does however talk of Arabia (6.37) in the context of the Christian scholar Origen’s life (it was apparently the source of a doctrine that the soul dies with the body, which Origen refuted).
At any rate, I am now off to dig through Herodotus and see what he has to say about Arabia; Pliny the Elder may have some points of interest as well; though I agree with Moira – I definitely want to hear more from Arabs and Bedouins on this topic. I’m just adding scraps from Latin and Greek sources because that’s all I can contribute re history of the terms Arab and Arabia at present.
Edouard, you know how much I am fond of the Arabic poetry and language especially the Jahili (pre-Islamic ones) and how much I used to be immersed in it. I don’t go with this sharp distinction between the Jahili and Islamic eras when it comes to language and culture. History is not a book with separate chapters and blank pages between chapters! 🙂 History is a continuum, and even the rise of Islam didn’t cause this sudden disruption to the older lingual and cultural facts, nor suddenly introduced new ones except some religious terms. When Omar used the term Eraab he didn’t learn it from Quran! He learned it from his society as a young boy before Islam. The Arabs awareness of their identity (and their horses identity as well) is a pre Islamic fact. Islam spread the sense of unity but not the sense of identity. So the question should be: how far in the Jahili era did this sense of identity start? Was it thousands of years, or just a few hundreds?
Thanks Kate! “Arab” (as an Arabic word) is a plural form not singular. “Arabi” is the singular form. Your analogy in this case is correct because it is the singular form that is derived from the plural form here not vice versa. Technically speaking the word Arab has no singular form form which it was derived. The word “Eraab” is also plural, and the commonly used singular is again “Arabi”. However Eraab has an abandoned derivative singular which is “Arib” which is a form of exaggeration or expressing strong meaning. So Eraab would mean very Arab, and indicates a sense of purity!
@ Kate: i found this book that details the pedigree of Phillip Arabs: Philippus Arabs: Ein Soldatenkaiser in der Tradition des antoninisch-severischen Prinzipats Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 61
Körner, Christian
Walter De Gruyter 2002
On Eraab: in Webbs publication above you will find in the pages 26-61 detailed explanation on how this term semantically has nothing to do with Arab identity and even ethnogenisis. However in the rest of the publication you can find out how it was used by early Muslim writers to retroject arabs into pre-Islamic history. non of the early lexicons connect this term and others like arabaa, arabaaya and aribi to purity.
So what I’m getting here, from Hylke and Yasser, is that Eraab currently has connotations of identity and purity, but that there are different views on when precisely those connotations arose, whether in the early Islamic period or in the pre-Islamic period.
Out of curiosity, would you be able to provide quotes from early Islamic and pre-Islamic literature, which use Eraab? I think it would be very interesting to see the original texts (transliterated if Arabic isn’t yet supported on the blog, I guess). This is honestly such an interesting and educational discussion, and I am learning so much.