New Book: The Arabian Horses of Abbas Pasha

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 sold at the 1860 sale, some 30 years earliers. Lady Anne Blunt had struggled to acquire full pedigrees for her and her husband’s purchases and was only partly successful in her endeavor. How I wish she had access to the Abbas Pasha Sale List.

The 336-page book, lavishly illustrated with XIXth century art, and replete with photographs of original documents and pedigrees is the outcome of collaboration between several people: Sheikha Sarah Al Fahad Al Sabah, owner of Al Arab Stud in Kuwait and General Manager of the Kuwait State Stud of Bait Alarab (Arabian Horse Center) who generously sponsored it; Judi Forbis, who picked the illustrations, worked on the layout, and penned the foreword, including an article about Lady Anne Blunt’s long quest for historical documents about the Abbas Pasha horses; Joe Ferriss, who did the layount, design and composition; Jeanne Craver, who proofread the final versions more times than she wants to admit; Michael Bowling, who shared the manuscript notes and photographs he had taken from the Crabbet Herdbook then in the possession of Lady Anne Lytton; RJ Cadranell, with whom I collaborated on the translation and analysis of the two surviving entries from the Ali Pasha Sherif studbook; Amelie Blackwell, who searched old copies of Volume 3 of the French Studbook for the 18 horses the French commission bought at the 1860 auction sale; Annalisa Monticelli, who looked for, found and photocopied the elusive Volume 1 of the Italian Studbook, where several dozen horses bought by the Piedmontese commission at the sale were registered; Claudia Dijkstra, whose collection of paintings and litographs graces many pages of the book; and several others as well.