This is a bottle in the ocean.. about whether anyone knows anything about a 1999 grey Al Khamsa Arabian mare oddly named Kiefer El Sherif (Hadaya Nile Anwar x Sherlaila by Sheriz) tail female to the W.R. Hearst import *Layya, hence an Obayyan by strain. Jenny Krieg — who owns her sister Maraya and Maraya’s daughter Labwah pictured below — and I were wondering if that was not a stallion mistakenly registered as a mare, because of the name, but then again you never know.
This is Jenny Krieg’s mare HS Marayah, from the rare Shaykhan strain from Lebanon, which is actually Ubayyan Sharrak. Photo C. Emmert, 2009
The asil stallion Ghalion-6 is by Ghalion (Morafic x Lubna) out of 25 Amurath-Sahib (Amurath Sahib x 221 Kuhaylan Zaid by Kuhaylan Zaid out of 11 Siglavy Bagdady II). He traces to the mare 60-Adjuze, imported from the Arabian desert by Austro-Hungarian Empire official Fadlalla El Hedad. Adjuze was reportedly bred by the Sba’ah Bedouins, her sire being a Kuhaylan al-‘Ajuz and her dam a “Schecha”, the transliteration of which is “Shaykhah”. “Shaykhah” is either a mare’s name or a strain’s name, depending on the context in which it occurs. In that case, it is likely to the strain of the mare, the full strain being Kuhaylat al-‘Ajuz al-Shaykhah, a lesser-known strain primarily owned by the Sba’ah and Fad’aan Bedouins.
If anyone who reads this website and lives in the USA knows where the 1987 stallion Tabbou (Saddat x Rose Al Badi by Shaikh Al Badi) and his 1985 sister PH So Uneeq (Imperial Faneeq x Rose Al Badi), both of the rare and coveted Shaykhan/’Ubayyan strain which hails from Lebanon, please email me privately: ealdahdah@hotmail.com. Their trace was lost some time ago, and I would like to track them back, and perhaps help them get back in production.
This little lady, Labwah al-Shaykhah (DB Krush x HS Marayah), represents a new ray of hope for the endangered Shaykhan (a branch of Ubayyan, formed in Lebanon and named after a Ubayyah mare called al-Shaykhah) strain. Only two or three mares of breeding age are know to be alive today, in the USA, one of which is HS Marayah, Labwah’s dam, owned by Jenny Krieg of Maryland. Labwah, whose name means lionness in Arabic, has the long ears for which the Shaykhan strain was known for back in Lebanon. Photo of Labwah courtesy of Jenny. July 20th update: By the way, Jenny and I have an article on that strain in the next Khamsat issue. You should subscribe!
A beautiful representative of the Shaykhan strain tracing to the Lebanon-bred mare *Layya imported by W.R. Hearst is the 1992 mare Nile Swan (Ansata Nile Comet x Fadda Laila). Congratulations to Michelle, her new owner. I hope this mare and others from her strain, like Jenny Krieg’s HS Marayah, contribute to a renaissance of this rare and precious strain.
This past weekend I took part of my family to visit with Jenny Krieg, of Poolesville, Maryland. Jenny is the president of Al Khamsa for a few more days. A new board will take over for a year after the 2009 Tulsa Convention, which starts today, and which I am so sorry for not being able to attend. Jenny is otherwise the proud owner of HS Marayah (2 pics below). Marayah traces to the Shaykhah mare *Layya, imported to the USA by W.R. Hearst in 1947. Jenny is one of the few breeders preserving this rare line in Asil form, and this year she bred Marayah to DB Khrush (pic also below) for a 2009 foal. In 2007, mtDNA research showed that Marayah and a Lebanese mare from the same strain and the same original breeder as *Layya shared the same haplotype, implying a common tail female ancestor. *Layya’s original strain, and therefore Marayah’s, is ‘Ubayyan, from the marbat of the Donato family, a merchant family of Italian origin settled in Lebanon’s Biqaa’ valley. *Layya’s great-grand dam was a famous and important mare, and was hence known as “al-Shaykhah” (feminine of al-Shaykh, or al-Sheikh, a honorific title in the Arab world). Her descendents were named al-Shaykhat, after her. They practically formed a new strain, and back in…
Since the past two entries have been about the Hearst import *Layya, I thought you’d enjoy this picture of Yalim (by *Ansata Ibn Halima x Zamayya, by *Zamal out of *Layya). Joe Ferriss has actually seen Zamayya, and I think he even has video footage of her.
Getting *Layya into the list of Al Khamsa Foundation Horses was not easy. There were a lot of rumors about the Hearst importation from the very beginning. Many people here in the USA, believed that H. Pharaon, who sold most of the horses to Hearst, was a crook, and that the horses were not Asil, but mongrels. These persistent rumors meant that the descendents of the 14 horses of the Hearst importation stayed out of the radar screen of the US purist breeding community for years. For instance, they never made it to Jane Ott’s Blue Arabian Horse Catalog (new website!). Skepticism about *Layya was not limited to US breeders. Some people in the Middle East wondered how Pharaon could have parted with such a precious mare. Also, people took it for granted that the Khamis family of Rayaq, Lebanon, who bred *Layya, would never sell a mare from their prized Shaykhan strain to Pharaon in the first place. Of course this is contradicted by the fact that George Khamis, who at one time was staying in the USA for health reasons, wrote the pedigree of *Layya in his own handwriting (I will ask if I can share a jpg of…
In 1947, American billionnaire and press magnate W.R. Hearst (of Hearst Castle fame) sent a party of several people, including his stud manager Preston Dyer, and the photographer J. Williamson, all around the Middle East in search of Arabian horses for his San Simeon stud. They toured Egypt, Arabia, Syria and ended up buying 14 horses from the racetrack of Beirut, Lebanon, most of them from Henri Pharaon. Pharaon was then president of the SPARCA (Societe Pour l’Amelioration de la Race Chevaline Arabe), which managed the Beirut racetrack. He was also Minister of Foreign Affairs of the newly independent Republic of Lebanon (my home country). If you want to known more about the Hearst importation and its circumstances, check this article out. One of the horses Preston brought back to the USA was the grey mare *Layya, the subject of this entry and a couple others to come. According to papers given by *Layya’s Lebanese breeder Georges Khamis to Dick Skinner of the Hearst Stables, *Layya (which he writes Leah) was a “Shikeh” by strain, by the stallion “Kayan” out of the mare “Naileh”. Khamis’s handwritten pedigree of *Layya provides somes details about *Layya’s ancestors. All of these are Asil Arabians that lived in…