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 Skowronek, and this, along with her Krush tail female to Dafina, is exactly the reason why my father bought her from Said Khair’s stud in Jordan and imported her to Lebanon, together with her son Sharif by a show horse of European lines. At the time, my father was a big fan of the Crabbet breeding program (and he still is in some ways), both under Lady Anne and then under her daughter Judith, and we did not know anything about Skowronek’s pedigree. We believed that Skowronek was the best thing that ever happened to Crabbet Stud, and Judith Wentworth certainly did a good job leading her readers to this conclusion. When we learned more about Skowronek, we sold Ziba to some local politician and she eventually found her way to Syria. Her non-asil status aside, Ziba had glorious tail carriage and movement, and was a…
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 acute and sensitive, lop ears are unknown and slack ears are a very bad fault. A good head can be discounted by badly carried ears.”
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 her daughter Lady Wentworth later ‘integrated’ (plagiarized?) in her book “The Authentic Arabian Horse”. “A straight profile should not be a defect if the forehead is very broad, the eyes placed low and very large, and the muzzle small”. Below is a headshot of Reema, a desert bred Hamdaniyat Ibn Ghurab, bred by the Aqaydat tribe of the Middle Euphrates region (the marbat originally belongs to the Shammar). Reema’s head is a good illustration of the above quote, although her eyes could be placed a tad lower.
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 bred by the Mutayr tribe, and sired by a Kuhaylan al-Krush from the same marbat. An asil line tracing to Dafina in the tail female survived until at least the mid 1950s, when the last asil mare was bred: this was the oddly-named and heavily inbred Foum Tattoene (by Flame of Reynall x Yaronda by Flame of Reynall), born in 1954. Had it survived, this precious line would have also safeguarded rare lines to the Blunt desert imports Jilfa (a Jilfat Sattam al-Bulad from the Shammar), Ashgar (a Saqlawi Ubayri from the Shammar), and Meshura (a Saqlawiyat ibn Derri from the Anazah). Below is another picture of the regal Dafina, from an old article on the Krush strain, (fraught with faulty assumptions, by the way, including the wrong assumption that the Lebanon-bred Krush Halba is the Blunt Sheykh Obeyd desert stallion Krush):
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 the facts, the stallion Skowronek has multiple lines to the English Thoroughbred mare Polka, and so does everyone of his descendents. One of these several genealogical paths is as follows: Skowronek –> his dam Jaskolka –> her sire Rymnik –> his sire Kortez –> his dam Gonta –> her dam Helada –> her sire Szumka III –> his sire Szumka II –> his dam Polka, an English Thoroughbred. This makes Szumka II an Anglo-Arab (even if he is not registered as such), and someone needs to change that in allbreedpedigree too (I hope I am not starting a war). Now comes the million dollar question: if you cross the descendents of an Anglo-Arab like Szumka II to Arabians for several generations, do they become Arabian horses or will they always and forever be Anglo-Arabs? [okay, partbreds]. To be sure, this question is worth much more than a million dollars, if the prices of…
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 precious work was written more than 1,200 years ago (yes, twelve hundred years ago) by one of the most prolific and knowledgeable medieval Islamic historians and genealogists. Every one of the 140 books Ibn Al-Kalbi (757 AD -819 AD) wrote is now lost, except two books that miraculously survived: the “Book of Horses” and the more famous “Book of Idols“. A manuscript version of the “Book of Horses” was published in Arabic, first in 1946, then in 1964. If you happen to read Arabic and live in the USA, here is a list of a few libraries where you can find a copy. I xeroxed mine from the Georgetown University Library. Another manuscript version was also translated to French and published by E.J. Brill Publishers in Leyden, Germany, in 1928. The “Book of Horses” revisits the stories of the most famous horses in pre-Islamic times (before 610 AD)…
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, is starting to look like a “Strain of the Month” in disguise). For now, I’ll start the discussion with a brief resfresher of the encounters between Arabian horse breeders and the more general Krush family (beyond Krush al-Baida). Feel free to pitch in with feedback in the comments section of this blog post if you noticed that I omitted a reference or more, or visit this site, which also offers an overview (with pictures) of the main Krush lines around the world. The early fame of Kuhaylan al-Krush was certainly associated with the quest of the Egyptian Viceroy Abbas Pasha I for Asil horses from this strain. Several sources (or perhaps one source that was quoted several times, will look that up later) tell us that Abbas’s quest eventually failed, and that Bedouin owners of Krush mares refused to sell them, or give them…