Radwan Shabareq of Aleppo told me the fascinating story of what is believed to be Thomas Darley’s rifle. Thomas Darley was Her Majesty’s Consul to the Levant, based in Aleppo, during the reign of British Queen Anne. In 1702, Thomas Darley acquired a young colt from the Fad’aan ‘Anazah Bedouins, which became the most prepotent of three foundation stallions of the English Thoroughbred horse breed. This was the “Darley Arabian”. Radwan told me that he had heard the story of Darley’s rifle from Raymond Juwayyid, an elderly Alepine collector, many years ago. According to Juwayyid, an ‘Anazeh Bedouin came to an Armenian jeweler in downtown Aleppo in the early XXth century to sell a long rifle intricately ornated with silver. Upon being asked for its provenance, the Bedouin admitted that he stolen it from his Shaykh, who had had it in his family for several generation. He reportedly claimed that his Shaykh would refer to the rifle as “Darley’s rifle”, and it was treasured family heirloom. The Armenian jeweler bought the rifle, and later sold it to Nu’man al-Dali’ (see the entry on *Mirage’s strain below, which is how I learned of this story), who gave it to his heirs, who gave it to Raymond…
The 1919 grey desert-bred stallion *Mirage (photo below, with owner Roger Selby) is a legend in American Arabian horse breeding. This Saqlawi Jadran stallion was born in the desert, and selected as a mount of the newly installed King of Iraq, Faysal I, before he was sold to a European ambassador and ending up in Lady Wentworth’s hands by 1923. You can read more about this in a good article by Michael Bowling, here. He was her dream grey horse, but the British registration authorities would not let her register him, so he sold him to Roger Selby of Ohio in the USA in 1930. Here *Mirage had a brilliant career at stud, and his is now one of the most successful sire line in the USA (that of Bey Shah, Huckleberry Bey, and Barbary, among others). *Mirage’s strain is recorded as “Seglawi Jedran of Dalia” which is better transliterated as “Saqlawi Jadran of al-Dali’ “. Recently, while looking at some documents pertaining to the Syrian Saqlawi Jadran stallion al-Abjar (photo below, from Raed Yakan, thank you Raed), which was owned the Yakan family of Aleppo, and which I saw at their stud in the early 1990s, I came across his breeder’s description of al-Abjar’s strain as…
Just came across an interesting article from 2005 in the New Scientist: Irish researchers analyzing Y-chromosome sequences in the DNA of a sample representative of the 500,000 or so English Thoroughbred racehorses alive today found that 95% of these horses traced to a single horse in the tail male: the Darley Arabian, born in 1700 (who by the way, was a Ma’naghi from the Fad’aan Bedouin tribe, which makes this strain one of the oldest recorded). I wonder how many different sire lines a similar study could identify within the Arabian horse population…