The wild horses “Hoshaba and Baz” and sloppy “scholarship”

I grew up reading Lady Wentworth’s massive book “The Authentic Arabian Horse” as well as Robert Mauvy’s little book “Le Cheval Arabe”. I had a great deal of trust in the first, and the second was bedtime reading for me for many years. 

Both books featured intriguing mentions of an Arabic legend about “Hoshaba” and “Baz”,  a pair of free-roaming wild horses in Yemen that were tamed by Biblical characters of same name (?), becoming the ancestors of today’s Arabian horses.  Baz was supposed to be the female progenitor and Hoshaba the male one. The legend, according to both Wentworth and Mauvy, led credence to the belief that the Arabian horse was indigenous to the Arabian peninsula from time immemorial. I remember searching for both characters in the Bible and not finding anything remotely related, but still trusting the authorities’ word on it. 

A cursory Google search for the “Wild Mare of Baz” shows that, from the “Horse Encyclopedia” and “The Story of America’s Triple Crown” to the “Ultimate Guide to Horse Breeds”, the legend of Hoshaba and Baz is alive and well in recent mainstream equine literature, having spread well beyond Arabian horse books. See here for instance: 

Carl Raswan was no stranger to the propagation of the legend of Hoshaba and Baz. His Index entry #1294 has for “Baz” has the following: 

BAZ (3000 B.C.). Great-great-grandson son of Noah (also the name of a whole region of ancient Southern Arabia) and the first recorded name of a captured wild mare of Desert-Arabia (YEMEN) is connected with BAZ (“The-Wild-Mare-of-Baz”). This wild mare was the dam of “FAYAD” (“overflow”), who (bred to “QUSAMAH”) sired “SAUDAH” and she, bred to “QANNAS”, gave birth to “SABAL” […]. See also YEMEN, “HASHABAH”, […] 

Raswan’s Index entry #3558, for “Hashabah” further has: 

“HASHABAH” (HUSHABEH SHABBUHA). The stallion “Fayad” and his Dam (the mare “BAZ”) “both of them being wild horses of the land of HASHABAH (says Hisham Ibn Al-Kalbi – […]). See also under “SABAL”, BAZ). HASHABAH was in Southern Arabia (YEMEN).  

 Early medieval historian Hisham Ibn al-Kalbi (d. 819) appears to the source of this legend, so, prodded by Hylke Hettema (ever the healthy skeptic), I went and checked out Ibn al-Kalbi’s “Kitab Ansab al-Khayl”. What I found  was very different. Below is a screenshot of the relevant exceprts in the Arabic edition: 

The first line translates as: 

“It is claimed that Fayad was from the wild ones of Wabar [min hushiyyat Wabar] son of Amim, son of Lud, son of Sem [Saam] son of Noah [Nuh], and that, when Wabar met their demise [halakat Wabar], their horses became wild [wahshiyyah], and could not be caught.”  

Three lines further down, another mention: 

“Muhriz son of Ja’far, claimed, after his father, after his grandfather, saying: ‘The A’waj of Bani Hilal is not out of the daughters of Zad al-Rakib, he is older than that! He is out of the daughters of the wild ones of Wabar [min banat hushiyyat Wabar].  

And yet another one, one line later: 

“As to the older A’waj, his dam Sabal was from the wild ones of Wabar [min hush Wabar], and his sire was from them [too]. 

Wabar is, of course, a famous ancient kindgom in Southern Arabia (its people are Ptolemy’s “Iobaritae”, says Juris Zarins), the capital of which, now lost, is dubbed as the “Atlantis of the Sands“. All Arab children who went to middle school (at least those who were not sleeping through history class) would remember that Wabar was one of the ancient, now extinct Arab peoples/tribes, like Thamud and others. What Ibn al-Kalbi was then relaying is a story that upon the downfall of Wabar, its domestic horses escaped and became feral. Some of the offspring of these feral horses, like Fayad, Sabal (dam of the famous A’waj) and the sire of A’waj, were caught back and brought into the gene pool of the horses of the later Arabs. Basically, think of the “wild horses” of Wabar like America’s mustangs: feral horses, some of which are caught and brought back to civilization from time to time. 

Meanwhile, between Raswan and Wentworth, sloppy “scholarship” had turned “Fayad min hushiyyat Wabar” (“Fayad is from the wild ones of Wabar”) into “Fayad min hushaba wa baz” (“Fayad is from Hushaba and Baz”), who then morphed into, respectively, the sire and dam of Fayad. Of course, the words directly following “min hushiyyat Wabar” are abouth a human genealogy to Noah, so Baz also became the great-great-grandson of Noah and the tamer of the wild mare of same name (and that it did not make sense did not matter much, and nor did the fact that Baz was nowhere to be found among Noah’s great-great-grandsons in Genesis). 

The confusion can be easily explained: if one imagines a dot above the Arabic letter “R” (ending of “Wabar”) the letter becomes a “Z” (ending of “wa-Baz”, ‘and Baz’); and if ones imagines one dot under the Arabic letter “Y” (in the middle of “hushiyyat”) instead of two dots, the letter becomes a “B” (in the middle of “hushabah”). After that, just leave it to the fertile imaginations of romantic peddlers of myths and legends about Arabian wild horses.