When “asil” was first used to refer to Arab horses
Yesterday, Hylke and I were discussing when the word “asil” (authentic, original in Arabic) first came to be used in reference to Arab horses, and by whom. I do not believe Bedouins were the first to use the term to refer to their own horses. Even today, they seldom do. Rather, I believe it is a word urban dwellers of Damascus, Aleppo, Bagdad or other cities first applied to some of the horses of the Bedouin to differentiate them from horses of unknown origin and provenance (kadish).
Hylke believes the spread of the word “asil” as applied to horses is connected to Orientalism, to European views of racial superiority and to the idea of “purity of blood”, applied to Arabian horses. That would have come about sometime during the nineteenth century. She believes the word was picked up by Syrian/Egyptian/Ottoman horse merchants, traders and other townfolks in response to European emphasis on “pure blood”.
It would be nice to find the earliest written reference to the use of the word “asil” in reference to Arab horses in Western equine and travel literature, but also in contemporary Arabic or Ottoman Turkish writings.
I think Ms Hettema is onto something.
I realize it would not be early in the sense you mean, but I don’t remember running across the word “asil” in any contemporary references to the Hamidie Society.
I don’t recall the term ‘asil’ being used, but did find it interesting to see the term ‘pure ones’ / ‘pure Arab horse’ used in Merit of the Horse in Islam. The text also uses the term ‘jade’ – does anyone know if that is in reference to the Nicean horse?
Beth
Everything I’ve read so far in western literature from the nineteenth century and earlier talks about ‘kochlani’, ‘koheil’, etc, and opposes that to ‘guidish’, ‘kaddish’. I think I have also seen a comment thread on this very blog which observed that Lady Anne Blunt did not use the term ‘asil’, but ‘mazbut’ instead, and Davenport, if I remember correctly, talks about ‘chubby’ (or is it ‘shabby’? I cannot remember, and have been at an endurance ride today, so am too lazy to look it up right this instant). I will see about doing a proper survey of the terms in the works I have later, but I suspect ‘asil’ was first used by westerners in the twentieth century.
Yes, LAB used mazbut or madbut, meaning acknowledged. Davenport used chubby, which is phonetic for Shabbuh, meaning accepted for breeding.
Thank you, Jeanne.
Raswan includes ‘asil’ in his 1945 article ‘Vocabulary of Bedouin words concerning horses’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 4:97-129. He defines it as:
“Pure.” See Asale – of the original asl root. The genuine breed of Arabian horses (not the kidish).
Rather earlier than Raswan is Tweedie (1894), “The Arabian Horse”:
This comes out in the word a-sil — having for primary idea established on a sure foundation — which in Arabia forms the equivalent of our “old,” as applied to birth. What the arch is in masonry, a-sa-lat, or a deeply laid foundation, is in the Arab’s view of breeding. (p. 94)
It has been seen that the Arab’s word for “thorough-breeding” is a-sa-lat, or the state of being firmly founded. The a-sil stock of the desert, though now rising, like certain classes of plants, on innumerable stems, instead of on a central one, is theoretically of one breed, which, according to the Arabs, is perfected and established. (p. 245)
The tree of a-sa-lat is known by its fruits. The Bedouin Arabs hold that a mare which is not a-sil cannot take care of her rider in Al ghaz-u. It may be assumed that they are right in this belief. If they had not discovered that purity of blood was an essential qualification, they would not have been so careful to produce it and maintain it. But obviously we have here a test which lies outside of the European’s world. Nobody but a Bad-a-wi appreciates the ideal with which it is connected, or possesses the means of proving that ideal.
Another form of evidence by means of which a-sa-lat may be certified is the general testimony of the Bedouin. Particular stress must here be laid, however, on the condition that all such witnesses shall be of the Bad-u, and that they shall be actually before one. (p. 247)
Niebuhr, and after him other writers, make “Kochlani” (Ku-hai-lan) and “Kadeschi” (ka-dishi) their two leading subdivisions of the Arabian breed. If we understand by the two terms no more than a-sil and less than a-sil, respectively; we shall have a useful enough rough classification. (p. 250)
There are two uses of asile in Daumas and Abd-el-Kader (1874) Les chevaux du Sahara, but, the first instance, where Abd-el-Kader uses it in a poem, is apparently not in reference to horses:
Nos ennemis n’ont point d’asile contre nos coups,
Car nos coursiers, ce?le?bre?s par le prophe?te, fondent sur eux comme le
vautour. (p. 285)
The second instance also refers to a strong place, or place of refuge, rather than a horse:
Puis-je vivre loin de l’asile que j’aime? Puis-je supporter l’absence des voisins auxquels je suis accoutume?? (p. 325)
Continuing to prove my first comment incorrect, Lady Anne apparently uses the term asil in her diaries, going from this extract quoted by Lady Wentworth in The Authentic Arabian Horse:
Everybody here (Hail) talks about breeds exactly as the Anazeh do. Ibn Rashid tells us he himself in a Ghazzu took one of the Seglawi Jedran mares from Ibn Sbeni. He will show her, or one of her foals. He told us he sends fifty or sixty colts every year to Bombay for the Indian English market, and that they fetch 1,000 rupees each and are really asil (pure bred). He described them as small ones. (p. 124)
In a footnote in the same book,
Abd er Rahman of Marawah (in Yemen) told the Blunts in 1884 interesting facts about the breed of horses there called Beyt el Komeyt (dark chestnut), which he said are never sold, but he could get them one— “give,” he said, if they would come some day. The horses are mostly mutlak e’ shemal (both hind and off fore white feet) with star. The country between Samaa and Marawah is rather unsafe. Beni Marwan have asil horses, though not equal to the Beyt el Komeyt. The Beni Marwan ride horses, not deluls. (p. 134)
It is unclear if asil is used by Abd er Rahman, the Blunts, or Lady Wentworth herself; Lady Wentworth certainly makes use of the term in several other places in the book.
And of course, there was the Arab horse, Asil, whom Wilfrid Blunt mentions in his 1884 article for The Nineteenth Century:
Captain Tryon’s Asil, also a three-year-old, is out of a mare imported from the Euphrates in 1880.
I haven’t found exactly that quote from Lady Anne’s published journals, but I do find a comment on mares at Hail that “they have not the look of breeding one expects from the aseel of aseel,” so she was using the term on the first desert journey.
The question of the origin of the concept of Asil has been growing inside me for years now. What does it mean and where did it come from?
It started when i started studying Arabic some 12 years ago, exited to be able to look up terminology that came with the horses i love so much.
But to my great surprise, Asil is not connected to horses in most arabic dictionaries… some modern dictionaries, written by Europeans however, do connect the term to horses. So the question is, how did the term come to life?
Arabic works with a so called radical-root system. Most roots contain 3 radicals that are adapted into verbs, nouns, adjectives etc via a complex morphological system.
The root of Asil is ASL.
This often gets translated as root= origin. But in early (7-8th century) dictionaries this is actually root=root of plant/tree.
What ive discovered so far, is that parallel to the development of the Arab identity in the 9-10th century, the term asil gets connected to language (lisan) and gets addtional meanings like “the time between afternoon and nightfall” (Ism???l bin ?amm?d al-Jawhar? (d.1003), T?j al-Lugha wa ?i??? al-?Arab?ya)
Connected to that time is actually the meaning that Asil would be the late afternoon/evening meal ‘Asha, and it is in connection to this time of meal that I first found a horse in the dictionary entry: al-Aslil= the horse with a swollen belly, from eating too much (or something not suitable to eat) (Al-???ib bin ?Abb?d (d.995), Al-Mu??? f? l-Lugha)
Much later, 12-13th century, the term ASL also starts to denote “connection” in the sense of not having or being ASL/Asil, you are “uprooted/unconnected”. Some dictionaries here offer explanation that it could mean you have no connection to a genealogy (see Genealogy in Medieval Muslim Societies by Zoltán Szombathy (2002) on how it was easy to buy yourself a genealogy).
But the real question of Asil in connection to horses remains: Even if there was a system of classifying individuals as Asil ( does it actually mean pure or noble? i have not yet gathered enough info to say anything about that just yet) it would be a bit anachronistic to assume that it would be applied to horses the same, especially without linguistic evidence.
That said, there might be answers in the Arabic literature on horses. Al Halabi (d.1777 CE) calls the horse both Arab and Asil, but he is rather late, and therefore i suspect that he possibly based some of his narrative on European influence (Gervase Markham already started using Arabian as a classification in 1668)
This question is definitely on my list of things to look at within my PhD research, so I should know a lot more in due time 🙂 Looking forward to your thoughts!
Hi Kate, thank you for digging into this! I would discount Raswan in this inquiry. He was not a serious scholar, but rather a genius advocate.
In Daumas, asile is a french word meaning “haven”, same root as asylum, so I would discount that too.
Jeanne, Shubuw indeed means “worthy of being bred from” or “breeding-worthy”.
As to mazbut/mathbut/madbut, which is in the passive form, it means literally “established”, “checked”, “proven”, as in authenticated (by men).
Michael, that would then refer to the pre-Mutlaq period in LAB’s career, when she was still deriving most of her local knowledge from the views of people from Bagdad, Aleppo (including Skene the English consul) and Palmyra.
So far, the earliest reference to the term asil as applied to Arab horses seems to be Hylke’s mention of Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Bakhshi al-Halabi, in his book “rashahat al-midad fi ma yata3allaqu bi al-safinat al-jiyad”.
There is an Arabic edition from 1930 published in Aleppo. There is also a recent translation by Munzer Absi, edited and published by Radwan Shabareq in 1996 (not 1972), under the title: “Sketches on Coursers of the Highest Breeding”. I have a copy in storage and I am going to dig out the exact reference.
Amazon link here: https://www.amazon.com/Sketches-Coursers-Highest-Breeding-Volumes/dp/B009UYK08Y/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=munzer+ansi+merits+horse&qid=1565691555&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0
An excellent bibliography in Arabic, on horses in Arabic literature: https://sahilhorse.com/article_detail_ar.php?id=52
Hylke can you check al-Bakhshi al-Halabi’s date of death? I have 1098 hijri which is 1686/1687 CE.
Yes, pre-Mutlak–but I was looking to verify that the usage was really Lady Anne’s and not Lady Wentworth’s interpolation. Lady Wentworth was influenced by Raswan (granted she’d hurt you if you tried to say so).
Good points, Michael. Kate, excellent detective work. This whole group effort could be pulled together as an article for the Khamsat. (I am always looking for good ones!)
Does the word asil as applied to horses occur in Palgrave, Doughty, Upton, or Guarmani?
Upton is not easy to read, but he uses kuhl or Kuhaylan as the term of choice, and he says Rzewusky does as well. He says Kuhaylan covers the strains of Al Khamsa, but then he starts going around in circles.
He does imply asil in saying that a bedouin seeing a horse from Baghdad, etc., might not say he is not an Arabian, but would say he is not noble.
Nope, not in Palgrave (he talks about Arab horses, and also Nejdean and ‘Anezeh horses), nor in Guarmani.
Crichton (1845, The History of Arabia: Ancient and Modern) says,
“The collective term whereby they designate them in general is Kohayl or Kochlani; but they commonly distribute them into five great races, all originally from Nejed. Some authors trace them back to the most remote times of paganism, assigning as their sire the famous stallion Mashour, the property of Okrar, chief of the Beni Obeida. Others assert that they are merely the issue of the five favourite mares of the prophet, named Rhabda, Nooma, Waja, Sabha, and Hezma.”
Thomas Pennant (1776, British Zoology) gives a 1722 hujjah for a grey Manaki Shadûhi/Monaki Shadûki; no mention of asil in his text, though he does, interestingly, use generous a couple of times, which means ‘noble’, ‘well-born’; it is always applied to the Arab horse, in contrast to horses of other breeds. He also uses kadish(“those which by way of contempt are called Guidich, or pack horses”), but not Kuhaylan.
So many interesting points Kate: 1) I would venture that generous in Pennant is “jawad” in Arabic (the generous steed); 2) that’s an early mention of a the Ma’naqi strain, though not as early as d’Arvieux’s mention of Tuwayssan (ca. 1675).
The Crichton excerpt is fascinating: the mention that the five main strains go back to Mashhur the horse of ‘Arar ibn Shahwan (Shahwan of Dahman Shahwan fame) and not to the five favorite mares of the Prophet can also be found in an account in Anne Blunt’s visits of the Tarabeen Bedouins of Palestine near Bershebba. Excerpt here:
” Story of the horse that came out of the sea. Its son from a Dahmeh Kehileh mare Meshur belonged to Arar and from him 5 mares, the originals of the strains of (1) Kebeyshan, (2) Seglawi, (3) Makludi [?], (4) Jaythani (Jeytani) (5) Tueyfi. Dahman Shahwan is better than Em Amr of Ranat el Awaj he spoke as of awaj el araqib (crooked hooks) whence ‘Om Argub’ — he never heard of Doheymeh Nejib. […] Maneqy and Jilfan are by themselves.”
Preliminary analysis here: https://daughterofthewind.org/arar-ibn-shahwan-and-his-dahman-stallion-from-lady-annes-visit-to-the-tarabin-bedouins/
Guarmani 1864-66.
“The Arab horse is asil, scielet, and kadish. The Asil is the pure blood, the horse of breeding, ma’ruf baytah a recognized family. The scielet is the half blood, the doubtful breed, a term still applied to the offspring of an asil wiht a kadish. The kadish is the ordinary horse.”
Lyman Doyle just reached about a possible reference to asil as applied to horses in Rzewuski’s quote of Abu Bakr ibn Badr al-Din al-Bitar’s “Kamil al-Sinaa’atayn fi al-Baytarah wa al-Zardaqah”. This is the medieval hippology treatise translated and published by Nicolas Perron between 1852 and 1860, and otherwise better known as “Le Naceri”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A2%C3%A7er%C3%AE
It is so known because it was commissioned by the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt al-Nassir Muhammad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An-Nasir_Muhammad).
Rzewuski mistakenly attributes the date of the book to 1229 CE, while it was written closer to 1333 CE.
The Rzewuski quote goes through a number of breeds of horses and attributes a overarching quality to each breed (he calls them strains, but I am not sure we are talking about Arabians only here, and all breeds/strains are identified after countries), such as:
“the Hijazi, and it is the most noble one”
“the Najdi, and it is the happiest one” [wrong Rzewuski translation of the Arabic word aymanuha by the way, it is more like “the most auspicious one”]
“the Yamani, and it is the most enduring one”
etc
etc
and at some point:
“the Khafaji, and it is the most asil one” (aysalaha).
The root is certainly “asl”, but the way the word is built from the root, however, is odd. The Arabic original needs to be checked first, before a final conclusion is reached.
Ooh, Lyman, you are quite correct! I have the original Italian here (but second edition, not first) of his El Kamsa, and I was fairly certain that he does not use asil in it – and as it turns out, I was searching for the wrong spelling, as he uses assil!
Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville (1697, Bibliothèque orientale) also has a translation of the self-same passage on the Hijazi, etc. His work is a translation of Hadji Khalifa’s Kashf al-Zunun, plus some other material; the Kashf al-Zunun includes Abu Bakr Ibn Badr’s Kamil al-Sinaa’atayn. Anyway, here’s the relevant passage from Barthélemy d’Herbelot:
‘FARAS, Un Cheval, Le Maître d’Ecurie, & Medecin des chevaux du Sultan Kelaoun Roy d’Egypte nous a laissé un ouvrage curieux intitulé Kamel al Sanatein, dans lequel il enseigne les deux arts de dresser & de guerir les chevaux. ll parle de dix races de chevaux, à chacune desquelles il donne l’épithete qui lui convient. ll dit que des trois races qui ?e trouvent en Arabie, ceux de la province de Hegiáz sont les plus nobles, ceux de Neged les plus surs, & ceux de l’Iemen les plus durs au travail, & les plus patiens.
‘Il passe ensuite dans la Syrie, & prétend que ceux de Damas ont le plus beau poil, & ceux de Mesopotamie, la plus belle taille, & les mieux tournez.’
No mention of the Khafaji, but I have seen other translations of this passage, and will try track them down
D’Arvieux says: ‘Ils appellent Kahhilan, c’est à dire, nobles, les chevaux qui sont d’une bonne & ancienne race; Aatiq ceux dont la race est ancienne , mais qui sont mésalliez; & Guidich, ceux qui ne sont bons que pour la charge, & que nous ne regarderions que comme des rosses.’ (Memoirs, Vol. III, p. 241).
He says something a little different in Voyage dans la Palestine: ‘Il y en a qu’ils appellent Kehhilan, qui sont les Nobles , d’autres Aatiq, qui sont d’ancienne race & mesalliés, aprés ceux-lá vient la derniere espece nommée Guidich comme nous dirions un cheval de charge, ou par mépris une rosse’ (p. 197)
No mention that I have seen of asil.
Thanks Lyman! okay, so Guarmani is the oldest reference so far in the West. I can’t figure out scielet, for the life of me.
and now it turns out Abu Bark ibn Badr, in his Nasiri book, has the earliest mention of asil as applied to horses, going back to 1322 CE.
Nothing in Karsten Niebuhr?
Niebuhr (1772, Beschreibung von Arabien) says:
‘Die Araber halten, wie bekannt ist, sehr viel auf ihre Pferde. Sie theilen sie gleichsam in zwo Arten. Die eine nennen sie Kadîschi, d. i. Pferde von unbekannter Abkunft. Diese werden in Arabien nicht höher geschätzt, als die Pferde in Europa, und man braucht sie Lasten zu tragen, und zu allen andern gemeinen Arbeiten. Die andere Art heisst Köchlâni oder Köhejle, d. i. Pferde, deren Abkunft man bereits von zwey tausend Jahren her aufgeschrieben hat. Sie sollen ursprünglich von der Stuterey des Königes Salomon abstammen, und werden gemeiniglich um sehr hohe Preise verkauft.’
Doughty (Travels in Arabia Deserta) says:
‘The Arabians believe faithfully that Ullah created the horse-kind in their soil : el-asl, the root or spring of the horse is, they say, ” in the land of the Aarab “.’ (Vol. II, p. 391)
He might say more that is to the point in Vol. I, but I don’t have access to that right now.
Kate, I like that Doughty quote, and the usage of asl as rooted in the land of the Arab. That is a slightly different twist on it, and it strikes a chord for me.
@Edouard: checked it and I think I made a typo, indeed 1686, but the translation lists 1678. Its always tricky to find the correct dates! Thanks for pointing it out!
Ive also been thinking about “scielet” very odd. looked up all possible root combinations in arabic, nothing that remotely comes close or is possible…
here is the original of kitab al Nasiri: https://www.wdl.org/en/item/17603/view/1/3/
This existence of this book often gets abused to get arguments about Arab horses across, so yes, lets check if we can actually find the fragment that Rzewuski mentions!
I found the fragment in Le Naceri where the Rzewuski quotes Lyman found came from! It is on page 6 of 175 of the link Hylke sent. That page also has a mention of the legend of the horse of the south, after the Yemeni historian Wahb ibn Munabbih.