A blog on desert arabian horses, past, present and future
Ziba (Dancing Magic x Shazla by Shazda out of Darthula out of Saladin II) was one of my father’s favorites. A 1980 mare from the ‘marbat’ of Lord and Lady Moyne, and tracing to the desert bred Kuhaylat al-Krush Dafina, a gift from Ibn Saoud to Judith Wentworth, Ziba had no less than ten lines to … Read more
Also from “The Authentic Arab Horse”, but from Lady Wentworth, this time.. “Ears: these are all-important. A stallion’s ears should be small, exquisitely shaped, sharply cut, and thin at the edges. They should be also of marvelously delicate modeling, beautifully chiseled, the tip delicately turned inwards, the points being very sharply defined. Hearing is very … Read more
This is from a handwritten note which I copied from Lady Wentworth’s “The Authentic Arabian Horse”. I don’t have the book with me (it’s in Lebanon in my father’s library), but I vaguely recall that it is an excerpt from Lady Anne Blunt’s manuscript, which she was working on before her death in 1917, and which … Read more
A previous entry (here) on the strain of Kuhaylan Krush al-Baida mentioned the mare Dafina, a 1921 Kuhaylat al-Krush, sent by King Abd al-‘Aziz Aal Saud to Lady Wentworth of the UK in 1927, through Mr Gilbert Clayton, the British Representative in what was not yet called the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dafina was apparently … Read more
I love the website allbreedpedigree.com . It’s one of those wikis that let you do whatever you want. Readers’ comments on the last entry I posted just put me in a subversive mood, so I went and changed the race of the mare Polka from “Arabian” to “Thoroughbred”. For those who are not aware of … Read more
These days, I have been enjoying reading excerpts of Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi‘s “Ansab al-khayl fi al-Jahiliyah wa-al-Islam wa-akhbaruha” in my spare time. This roughly translates as “The genealogies and accounts of horses in the era before Islam and after the rise of Islam”, and is commonly known as “Kitab al-Khayl” (the “Book of Horses”). This … Read more
Western Arabian horse breeders are relatively familiar with the Arabian horse strain of Kuhaylan al-Krush (also known as Kuhaylan Krushan) through a variety of sources. A specific branch of this strain, Krush al-Baida (“the white Krush”) will be the subject of the sixth part of the “Strain of the Week” series (which, by the way, … Read more