Some informed speculation about the desert-bred mare *Al Hamdaniah

One of the earliest desert-bred Arabian horses to come to the USA from the Kindgom of Saudi Arabia was the mare *Al Hamdaniah. This grey mare with her conspicuous blood mark on the shoulder, was the subject of this blog’s first entry, some fourteen years ago.

Born in 1940, by an ‘Ubayyan stallion out of a Hamdaniyah mare, she was bred by Prince Sa’ud Ibn ‘Abdallah Ibn Jalawi, an early governor of Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province, who gifted her to Admiral R.L. Connolly, who imported her to the USA.

This morning I was thinking that her 1940 date of birth was significant. Dr. Ahmed Mabrouk of the Egyptian RAS had visited the stud of Sa’ud Ibn Jalawi in 1936, a mere four years before the birth of *Al Hamdaniah. He would have seen her dam at Ibn Jalawi’s stud.

The account of the visit of Dr. Mabrouk includes a list of the stallions, colts and mares he saw, some eighty horses in all. It yields some clues about the pedigree of *Al Hamdaniah: Of the three ‘Ubayyan stallions and two ‘Ubayyan colts he saw, none were grey. Because a grey horse like *Al Hamdaniah must have at least one grey parent, one can then assume that the the dam of *Al Hamdaniah was the grey parent. Interestingly, the only mare of the Hamdani strain on Dr. Mabrouk’s list is this one:

13. El-Hamdaniah El-Safra, flea-bitten roan, 10 years, faint star, race and snip. 

Everything matches for this mare to be the dam of *Al Hamdaniah: the color (safra, which is grey), the age (born ca. 1926, so 14 years old in 1940), even the markings are the same: “flea-bitten roan” is a rather accurate description of the concentrated red fleabites that make up Al Hamdaniah’s bloody shoulder. Of course, this is all speculation, not hard evidence, but a good likelihood still.