“New” photo of early Crabbet mare Bozra
Kate found this “new” photo of the early Crabbet mare Bozra, by Pharaoh out of Basilisk. Both sire and dam were desert-bred, and both of the strain of Saqlawi ibn Dirri — a branch of the Saqlawi Marighi, itself a branch of the Saqlawi Ubayri (not Jadran).
This mare would not be out of place in North-Eastern Syria today.
The picture comes from Volume 1 of The Standard Cyclopedia of Modern Agriculture and Rural Economy, edited by R. Patrick Wright, and published in 1909, says Kate.
She’s certainly not smooth-bodied like the later Egyptians that the Blunts acquired, but there’s something so aristocratic and old school about her. Really a neat time capsule, and you can see how she might have been the type of Arabian that the English sought out for their Thoroughbred breeding. iirc the Basilisk damline WAS used to cross to Thoroughbreds at one point, but I don’t know if any modern TBs carry her blood. RJ might know.
It’s ironic, this was for many years the “standard” (to the best of my memory, the only known) photo of Bozra. Everything old gets to be new again.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 in action, I suppose.
It just reflects my ignorance of what was “standard” before 2010.
I have that image of Bozra from one of the late Christine Massey’s photo albums which I purchased at an Al Khamsa Convention auction about 12 years ago. There were many interesting images in Christine’s photo album, mostly ones she took herself of contemporary horses from her travels, but also some good ancestral images from her collection and some other collections. There are a number of ancestral photos of some close up to Basilisk tail female descendants such as Belkis, Belka, Betina and Boaz. Actually she made many photo albums like the one I purchased which have now come into the hands of The Arabian Horse Archive for future digitizing as funding would allow.
Oh, wow, the actual photo itself? That’s so cool! Would love to see the rest of the Basilisk tail female photos as well, especially Betina and Boaz.