A blog on desert arabian horses, past, present and future
What you have below is a very precious and informative document: It is clipped from an Arabic horse magazine article, a scanned copy of which was sent to me by Pure Man. It sheds light on Arab royalty’s regular practice of sending each others horses as gifts. The letter, from King abd al-Aziz Aal Saud … Read more
This document recently appeared on one of the discussion threads below. For those of you who know the Abbas Pasha Manuscript in its English edition, this is just the first page in one of the original Arabic editions.. This is a quick and dirty translation (writing from work, gotta go home soon), without the Quran … Read more
Musette (b. 1932), a Saqlawiyah by strain, is a good specimen of the Asil Arabians bred by the French government stud of Pompadour in the first half of the twentieth century. She reminds me of some of the first and second generation offspring of the horses imported by Homer Davenport to the USA in 1906. … Read more
In 1909, a French government commission led by Inspector Quinchez bought 24 desert-bred stallions from the Egyptian racetrack of Sidi Gaber in Alexandria. Of these, 17 went to Algeria (then a part of France), and the remaining 7 were distributed in government studs across mainland France. The seven were: Dahman, Meenak, Farid, Aslani, Hamdany El Samry, Latif and Maarouf. The … Read more
After an unfortunate technical problem with uploading pictures that lasted over one week, this blog is back at work.  Apologies for this glitch. Last week, I provided the translation of the hujjah (authenticity certificate) of a desert-bred mare that mentions the stallion Duhayman al-Ajarrash. The mare traces to the horse through her maternal great-granddam. Duhayman al-Ajarrash … Read more
The mare in this picture is desert bred, from the strain of Jilfan Stam al-Bulad. Her breeder is an old Bedouin from the al-Yassar section of the tribe of Tay. The picture is frm the early 2000s, and I think that mare is still breeding today.  She is of interest because she traces to a stallion of the Dahman … Read more
Back to El Nasser. An earlier post identified his sire, “Douhaymane El Ajarrache”, as a Dahman (or Duhayman) ‘Amer from the al-‘Ajarrash family of the Shammar Bedouin tribe. “Douhayman El Ajarrache” was actively breeding in 1937, when El Nasser’s dam was bred to him to produce El Nasser in May 1938. Last year – and here is the fresh information … Read more
The starting point of any serious discussion on El Nasser should be a short statement in Judith Forbis’ “Authentic Arabian Bloodstock”, p. 137, where she cites a letter from Henri Pharaon, the one-time owner of El Nasser.  “Pharaon wrote to me on October 6th, 1970 that El Nasser was born on May 1938, that he had purchased the horse from … Read more
This is one of my favorite old pictures. The horse pictured is Dahman, a dark chestnut stallion bred by the Shammar Bedouin tribe in 1905, and sold to a French horse-buying commission led by Inspecteur Quinchez in 1909.  Dahman was a herd sire for the Shammar prior to his importation to France. He was by a … Read more