On Lady Anne’s visit to Saud al-Tahawi in 1887

In Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals and Correspondence, the nice journal entry on February 20th, 1887 on the visit to Saud al-Tahawi, the reference to: “Fourthly, a Kehileh Taytanyeh [?] fleabitten” is of course to a Kehileh Jaytanieh.

The strain of K. Taytanyeh does not exist, while K. Jaytanyeh (or J’aitniyah) is well known. The J at the beginning of a sentence in a handwritten letter can easily be taken for a T, and the editors were not sure of the transcription hence the question mark after it. This is indeed the strain of several mares at Sh. Sulayman Abd al-Hamid Eliwa al-Tahawi, including Bombolla and her daughters, a strain he got from his father Abd al-Hamid, who in turn must have received it from other Tahawi.

Also, the reference to “a Kehilet el Tamoryeh (bred here), chestnut, very like Damask Rose and said to be of Roala origin, dam of all the young stock except one”  is to a mare of the Kuhaylan Tamri strain that was obtained by Saud al-Tahawi from Nasir al-Mi’jil (aka Ibn Maajil), and whose line is very meticulously recorded in the herd book of his son Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi, which was transcribed and uploaded online by his great grand son Mohammed Mohammed Othman Abdallah Saoud al-Tahawi, and which I write about here.

This chestnut K. Tamriyah mare is very probably the mare named al-Shaqra in the herdbook of Abdallah Saud al-Tahawi:

History of the origin of the horses of the Shaykh of the Arabs ‘Abdallah [son of] Sa’ud

1. Kuhaylah Tamriyah, named Hanum, originating from al-Sham [Syria, henceforth], taken from Nasir al-Mi’jil of the Arabs of Sba’ah in the year 1292 H, her sons are to be mated on all noble [jawad] horses.

2. she was bred to the horses of the Shaykh of the Arabs Smida Sulayman al-Tahawi, and the origin of the house [in the sense of marbat] is Jilfan bought from the Arabs of ‘Anazah. She gave birth to a filly named al-Shaqra in 1294 H.

3. The afore-mentioned al-Shaqra was bred to a ‘Ubayyan [Abu] Jrayss whose origin is from Syria from the Arabs of Sba’ah, and she gave birth to a filly named Umm Shinaf in 1300 H. 

Her daughter born in 1300 H is too young to have been the dam of all the young stock, and her dam Hanum, was not “bred here”. 1294 H is 1877 AD, so al-Shaqra must have been 10 years old when LAB saw her.