The Davenport hujaj, one hundred years later

RJ Cadranell and Jeanne Craver are the custodians of the hujaj (original Arabic certification documents) of the horses imported by Homer Davenport from the Arabian desert to the USA in 1906. They kindly gave me the permission to use these hujaj on this blog for educational purposes, and I would like to thank them for doing so. The hujaj are a treasure trove of information which can be readily exploited.

As these original desert-bred imports  are the ancestors of today’s “Davenport Arabians”, I will first seclect one of today’s Davenport horses at random- say Jauhar El-Khala, whose lovely pictures are below – and look at the hujaj of her desert-bred ancestors, and second link these hujaj to those asil horses living in Syria today, wherever possible.

If you take Jauhar El-Khala’s pedigree as displayed on the Davenport Arabian Horse Conservancy website, you’ll see that she traces exclusively to the following 11 desert-bred imports, all obtained by Homer Davenport in his 1906 trip to the northern Arabian desert: *HAMRAH,  *URFAH, *WADDUDA,  *DEYR, *MUSON,  *JEDAH,  *RESHAN,  *HAFFIA, *ABBEIAN, *ABEYAH, and *WERDI. In other words these 11 horses, crossed with each other, constitute all the original imported ancestors of the mare Jauhar El-Khala.

It is actually possible to reduce the number of the original ancestors of Jauhar El-Khala to 10, because according to Davenport’s records, two of these imports, *HAMRAH and *HAFFIA are out of two imported mares, respectively *URFAH and *ABEYAH, and by the same desert-bred stallion, a “Great Hamdani” who was not imported. So the known original ancestors of Jauhar El-Khala are: *URFAH, *WADDUDA,  *DEYR, *MUSON,  *JEDAH,  *RESHAN, *ABBEIAN, *ABEYAH, *WERDI and the “Great Hamdani” (an asterisk marks a horse imported to the USA).

Of these 10, 7 have surviving hujaj; an eigth one, the “Great Hamdani”, is a desert-bred who was documented in Davenport’s writings, the ninth probably has a hujjah (*ABBEIAN, because there is a lingering debate on whether the hujjah actually belongs to him, more later on this). The hujjah of the tenth, *DEYR, is not known to have survived, although *DEYR is also documented in Davenport’s book “My quest”.  Lets look at these one by one over the next few entries.