Lady Wentworth in her book, The Authentic Arabian Horse, Three Voice Concerning the Horses of Arabia - Tradition (Nejd, Inner East); romantic Fable (Islam); The Outside World of the West (3rd edition - 1979) has allowed her famous mother, Lady Anne Blunt and somewhat her father, Wilfred S Blunt to express their final thoughts on the Arabian Horse.

The illustration to the left show "drawings of South Arabian and Nejd rock inscriptions brought back in 1937 by Mr St John Philby, who has allowed me (Lady Wentworth) to reproduce them.

(1) Nejran, (2)Mushainige, (3) Nejd Sahi, (5) Sa'ih, (6) Sa'ib Arjan, (7) Tannur, (8) This sign, says Mr Philby, shows the presence of a well being usually indicated by dots alonside the bucket, at the end of a rope, the distance from the well being usually indicated by dots alongside the bucket, ead dot showing one doube pace. The threefold tail of the horse seems to be the source of the triple tail in the old British coin inset. The tail in the photograph of a living Arab horse appears to have been the evident type and mode for both.

Cunobelin First Century BC - The circle here has no spokes."

FROM LADY ANNE BLUNT'S NOTES
(Quoted in her own words)

(a) THE VOICE OF TRADITION (Nejd and inner East)
(b) THE VOICE OF ROMANTIC FABLE (Islam and outer East)

OPINIONS on the Arabian Horse seem to me to fall naturally into three classes, or Voices, thus :
One from the Inner Circle of Nomad Central Arabia, the high plateau called Nejd.
Another from the Outside World of the East.
A third from our own Outside World of the West.

The first, or Nomad Voice of Nejd, has its own, independent, original, local tradition of the horse as having existed in ancient times, in a wild state, in those deserts which, however, were then not like they are now, for in the primitive ages Nejd was a region of rains and of rivers with running water.

The second, or Voice of the Outside World of the East, which one may call the Islamic Voice, has adopted the original tradition of the first; but has grafted on it a fantastic fabric of romantic legends, pious inventions which require a separate notice to themselves, pointing out their divergence from the first Voice. That first Voice had existed previously and quite independently of them.

The two, however, agree in believing the Arabian breed to be unique in value and in merit, and to have had a wild origin.

Authors of the many books on the horse with which the literary world of Islam has teemed ever since the second century of the Hejra hold that the Arabian surpassed all other breeds of horses. Many count only two sorts of horse: the "true" or Arabian, and the "false", which includes everything else indiscriminately. All agree that it is quite distinct in itself; only the Islamic authors allege that this is from its having been miraculously created, or brought into domestication for religious purposes.

Thus all such books are largely pervaded by legendary lore, the spirit of which is a thing absolutely foreign to that of the considerable portion of tent-dwelling Central Arabian tribes, whose aloofness has allowed their ancient tradition to escape the influence of the settled folk. In those truly Nomad tribes a certain independence of mind inherited from pre-Islamic times has never died out.

All the settled folk, dwellers in houses, fell readily under the sway of "the people who write books" as soon as the rare art of writing became diffused, and the writers fell, equally readily, within the grip of the zeal and enthusiasm of the preachers of Islam, and for the first century or so serving the new religion seems to have been its sole purpose. But when men began to pause, and look back, they were deeply stirred by the memories of past events in their tribal history, some to the degree of spending long lives in collecting, sifting, and verifying their pre-Islamic traditions. Thus they set themselves to writing on subjects other than religion, and among these on the horse.

The earliest recorded Arabic works on the horse were those of Abu Obeyda, his birth being one hundred and six years after the Hejra, and of El Asmai (Abd el Melik ibn Qoreyb), a few years his junior. Next in value to the lost horse books of these two would be the Treatise on Horses of Ibn Qateyba a century later; but that too is lost. Abu'l Faraj el Isbahani's Aghani, or Book of Songs, also of third century A.H., and the collection called the Hamasa, earlier by about four score years, contain much mention of horses; but in both cases casually, and because such horses were involved in narratives concerning human beings. Still, what they tell is of extraordinary interest and value, for the horse was part of the very life of his owner.

The poems given in Aghani are incomplete, as he only gives the portions which were sung. His book on the Arabs (it may be the Days) was lost. Also the post- and pre-Islamic poets are mixed up in confusion.

The Nomads alone have retained their own tradition undisturbed in its original simplicity, notwithstanding their intimate relations with the oasis-dwelling populations, because neither their acceptance of Islam, nor their Bedouin urgent need of friendly trading watercourse, can bridge the gulf of antagonism which separates the two classes. The wandering dwellers in black tents, "who write not, neither do they read," have never ceased to look down with more or less contempt upon all settled folk, even those admitted to be their own kith and kin and of the same noble ancestry, as having demeaned themselves and lost caste and become, as they say, "mortally corrupted."

Thus to them the fantastic tales of Islamic pietistic romance have not appealed as to the townspeople. In regard to the miraculous creation of the horse, out of a handful of wind from the south, or the picturesque stories of Ismall Ibn Ibrahim and his quest of the wild horse and the capture of it, or the glories of the El Khamseh. or the Supposed "Five," one may hear these referred to by the detached Bedouin of Nejd as fables told by the writers of books. The mere fact of a thing being written is apt to lay it open, in his opinion, to suspicion of being a fabrication!

Very unwelcome to him is the suggestion of the Ismallitic pedigree. alleged in Arabic literary works for certain tribes, if he happens to be of those claiming descent from Qahtan. He receives it with indignation as well as with incredulity.

All that he is willing to accept as worthy of trust is his own tradition. It has been handed down to him orally, as already transmitted through several generations of men whose characters are still within recollection to the present generation of his tribe. To those previous generations, in their turn, it had been passed on as authentic in the same manner as by their forefathers, men of reputation known to them.

This frame of mind prevailed also, up to a certain point, in the early Arabic collectors of the Aghani and Hamasa and other works, even. though they were book writers. They were conscientious sifters of pre-Islamic tradition, noting the whole string of narrators for ten or more generations, and giving reason for accepting information from such a one, or for rejecting it from such another, but only up to a certain point, for their attitude was quite the reverse when a tale of miracle or a story of pious invention came upon the scene. Anything of that sort was welcomed if it tended to magnify the glory and prestige of Islam, however incredible it might be.

Of the legends universally received in the Outside World of Islam, the most prominent regarding the horse are those as to Ismail and Solomon, which will be given presently.

A.-THE FIRST VOICE THE VOICE OF TRADITION (NEJD AND INNER EAST)

The value of Islamic traditions, when stripped of their mist of semi-religious imagination, lies in the unquestionable acceptance of the old pre-Islamic tradition of a wild horse in Arabia of great antiquity, the capture of which is placed so far back as Ishmael, about 1800 to 2000 B.C., or even earlier. The "horse of the desert which stumbleth not" and the "horse and his rider" are mentioned in the Book of Job. Divested of mythical detail there is a certain value in the Islamic fables of Solomon and his Arabian horses. It identifies them as Arabian horses. His reputed pride in them is only a reflection of the national pride and exclusiveness of both townsfolk and tentfolk of Nejd.

In the Nomad this pride is first in his own high lineage and that of his horses and second in the land of his birth, with its moon and stars, its glittering, illusive mirage; dear to him is the very soil of it, notwithstanding the ever-growing pressure of the struggle for existence in the midst of an ever more relentless drying up of that strange upland, with its mountain ranges, its rocks and gorges, home of the ibex, its valleys and plains abounding with antelope, ostrich, gazelle, and other wuhush (wild creatures), besides its two species of tame ones-its camel breed reckoned the fleetest and best in the world, and its horse quite unique.

Apart from the one overweening pride of the men of Nejd, their view of life is bristling with inconsistency and contradiction; pride of lineage and equal descent neither is, nor ever was, a preventive of bitter and sanguinary inter-tribal warfare, and precisely among those tribes most nearly connected and regarding themselves as the creme de la creme of mankind. So has it been from earliest times recorded, and so does it continue up to the present day, and apparently ever will remain while the tribes exist.

Despising the rest of the world, they have no mercy on one another; but for that matter everywhere else are family feuds the worst.

Neither has pride nor love of soil precluded successive migrations from that highland home in search of some less inhospitable region. It is true that for or against such migrations there was hardly a choice, and the remnant left behind might be more grateful than they are to those whose departure made room, so sorely needed, but on whom instead they are apt to look askance with the eye of the fault-finder.

Thus in one respect and one alone, it would seem, are they consistent, those eccentric folk of Nejd, and that one is race pride, their own and that of their horse, which are so blended as to be inseparable. Truly is that horse prized by them: above all else in the world, believed in them as being theirs alone in origin, and that from all time in an immeasurable past. You hear the very same words used now in prose as those uttered so many centuries ago in verse, by uncounted Nomad poets, before the rise of Islam, which is so often credited erroneously with having caused the rise of the horse in Arabia, where, on the contrary, Islam found the horse in possession and rejoiced exceedingly when its own meagre force of 2,000 horsemen rose to 20,000 on being joined by the Nejd tribes, bribed by an offer of double war spoil.

You hear the very same remark made now: "Children of mine may hunger and thirst, but never my mare," in the very same tone of mind in which the pre-Islamic warrior made it.

As to when the triliteral root " Araba," " Aribi," or Aribu" became applied to the Peninsula itself there seems to be no certain date. The Romans talked of three " Arabias."

The Nomad tribes of the Central Plateau, those of our day, claim that their ancestors were the original proprietors of their "Jezira" (island, as they call it), a term in which they now include the whole of the Peninsula, Nejd being regarded as a Holy of Holies in the midst of it. They, having owned it long before the Osmanli was heard of, looked upon the Turk and his "Dowla" as a modern upstart and a hateful interloper.

The more the pitv that some of them have been base enough to bring their private quarrels before" that interloper and to appeal for his intervention. However, as already stated, Arabs are as hopelessly unreliable, politically, now as they were in the days of the pre-Islamic intrigues with Abyssinia, Byzantium, and Persia.

As mentioned already, the remnant remaining in Nejd, besides such political inconsistency, is apt to look askance at the tribes whose departure made room for those left behind, and to blame them because their northern surroundings have placed them so near to the horse-breeding Turkoman tribes and the Kurds that their own equine stock has in some cases lost its original purity of blood through the temptation to breed for size.

The Nejd tradition as to how they came by their horse was and is this simply: that the horse was wild in their land until caught by their ancestors and tamed in the primitive days of old, when Nejd and Yemen were fertilized by rains and running waters, and giraffes existed.

The colour of the wild horse was said to be reddish-grey. The full-grown horses could not be caught, only young foals, just as the young of gazelles and ostriches are now reared. Many died in the process of rearing by hand. Ostriches caught small are taken to some oasis to be sold. The settled people can bring them up, but the tentfolk cannot.

The Nomads believe that ever since the primitive ages the earth has been drying up (El Ard tn' shaafet).

The belief is strangely in keeping with the views of the late geographical writers; and the Bedouins have certainly not got it from outside of the wild horse it was said to me: "other people read things in old books, or on stones but we took it with our hands" (clasping them).

In reply to eninquiry "What became of the wild horses that remained uncaught?" It was answered They died out, just,as ostriches died out In Egypt." Perhaps in both cases dieing out may have been assisted by relentless hunting, as well as by desert desiccation. The name of Wady el Naam (valley of ostriches) remains to recall the fact that between Cairo and the Red Sea coast that bird still flourished less than a century ago. Aoude, the Howeyti, can remember shooting ostriches between Cairo and Suez: this implies that some still existed within about eighty years.

In ancient times the conditions of life were far more favourable than now of this there is abundant, historical evidence, apart from the geological proofs of gradual desiccation, of which Indeed the signs on the spot are, one would think, sufficient to convince the least observant of travellers. Truly the aspect of Arabia is that of a land which has been drying up for long ages.

That fact is now thoroughly well established by geology, which science, as is remarked by Caetani, proves that Arabia was once a land of trees, rivers, and lakes.

He adds that the vast tracts described by the word "desert," so far from having always existed, are of "recent, even very recent" formation, that they are a part of a physical process affecting the whole earth, slow but continuous and implacable.

Philby, who visited the heart of Arabia in more recent times, spoke of the wonderful bottomless pools of El Kharj, remains of the once great water supplies now rapidly disappearing. 1

1 The term "swimmers" for galloping horses so much used by the Nomads in lands where there is no\v no water seems another argument for the antiquity of their existence in a land which once had rivers with fish, whose darting and turning became a comparison for the darting speed of a horse charging, the term remaining long after the cause of it had been lost to memory.

It is necessary to note a point of great importance, namely, the Nomad tradition of the colour of the wild horse, i.e. a reddish-grey or "gold verging on white." The immense size of the eyes of all Arabian living things, birds included, is one of the most striking peculiarities, and it is a wild characteristic in no sense due to domestication.

The Nomad Arabian horse lives as nearly a wild life among the tribes as any tamed animal can live. There is no comfort, high feeding, grooming, or care bestowed on him. In fact, I do not think any nation on earth treats its horses with so total a disregard of all rules of horeekeeping. Closely shackled at one moment with his feet all drawn under him, and ridden to death the next. Yet he keeps his pure wild type unchanged.

A strong reason, to my mind, for belief in the indigenous breed is the physiological one which shows us the pure Arabian under circumstances the least favourable to his own development, yet nevertheless the most perfect of all domestic breeds.

[The Nejd tradition repeated to Mr. Blunt in 1879 was that the wild horses in ancient times were captured by enclosing large spaces with "a fence of stones and bushes, within which, in the heat of summer, they came to drink at springs in the hills. This was done gradually so as to accustom the herd to the enclosure, when it was finally blocked, and the horses, reduced by hunger, were easily captured. But Lady Anne Blunt states that the true tradition of the horse-breeding tribes is that of catching the young ones, and not of enclosing spaces; but both may have been done.

Both show the belief of the Bedouins in the formerly wild ancestor of their own purely native breed. It is beyond question that this is so, and that they regard with the utmost contempt the horses of every other nation, however well shaped, powerful, and swift these may be.

Unlike the northern Nomads, there is never the smallest question among the Nejd Bedouins of seeking new stallions from any quarter "to improve their own breed". They do not believe that their breed can possibly be improved, or that outside the circle of the Nejd tribes any horses exist deserving of the name. Indeed, they do not admit the claim of any other breed to be called Faras, holding them to belong to a different order of creation, immixture with which would be unnatural and the result worthless. Thus it is not too much to say that were the finest horse in the world sent to them by its greatest potentate, the Sultan himself, his services would not be made use of for the most insignificant native mare. This happened in the time of Abd el Aziz el Raschid. The Sultan sent five English Thoroughbred stallions as a gift. Abd el Aziz received them with due honour, but as soon as the envoy left he had them gelded and sent to draw the well-ropes.

W. Blunt writes:

"Pre-Islamic poetry treats firstly of the chief interests in desert life, the hills and valleys, the springs of water, the clouds, winds, and storms, next of the wild animals, and especially of their tame camels and horses.

"In a secondary position stand the references to agricultural life, palm gardens watered by streams, with flowers and scents and the humming bees, and to the trade of distant cities. The dwellings described are always the black Bedouin tents of goats' hair, with the hearth stones set up in the valleys and abandoned as the camp moves on. Love stands in the foreground here of all the poems, love of a romantic but at the same time quite practical kind, with the wilderness for scene and the stars for witness. There is much of personal reminiscence, boasting of past pleasures, and regret for estrangements. There is much too of social enjoyments, hospitality given, wine drunk, and camels slaughtered. Lastly and especially come the politics of the tribes, their wars and peace-makings, their raids and their flights, tales of bloodshed and revenge, of insults heaped up and. replied to with blows. Far away stand the figures of certain potentates of the outside world, with whom they have come into contact and collsion-the Kings of Yemen, Hira, and Ghassan, the Chosroes of Persia, and the Cresars of Byzantium. The special character which distinguishes these from any other primitive poems is the complete absence from them of every mystical or supernatural element. There is not the remotest suggestion in any of them of the religious fables and superstitious beliefs about the past which make up so large a part of all other early verse-making of Persia, India, and Greece.

"A practice of divination with arrows alone is referred to, not very seriously, as a winter
amusement; and occasionally the sayings of soothsayers. Otherwise there is no hint of things not wholly visible to the natural eye, which imply a belief in God, or ghost, or evil genius. Even of those fabulous animals believed in elsewhere by all the world ancient and modern, there is not, from first to last, a word. We may therefore accept with the fullest confidence what few lights these poems throw on the way in which the Bedouins of their day regarded their, horses."

Islam was the death-blow to the inspiration of desert song, and in three or four generations it became merely imitative.

B.SECOND VOICE
THE VOICE OF ROMANCE FABLE (ISLAM AND OUTER EAST)

With the preaching of Islam and the adoption by the Arabs of a supernatural creed in the seventh century A.D. we find a notable change in their ideas. Poetry was for a while discountenanced by the Caliphs, and for nearly two hundred years there may be said to have been no Arabic literature other than that of religious controversy. Then a reaction took place and a rage set in for the putting down in writing of every- thing connected with the pre-Islamic past. A mass of religious traditions connected with the life and sayings of Mohammed and his companions had already been compiled, the vast majority of which was rather in the nature of pious inventions than true history, and now a similar process was applied to what were called the "Days of Ignorance," and the ancient Arabian heroes were rehabilitated and their adventures and every tradition concerning them carefully chronicled. The writing (i.e. Composition), however, was no longer of the simple and naturalistic kind of the early poets, nor were the writers (i.e. the authors) Bedouins. Superstitious notions of every kind had been adopted into the ideas of the Arabs; or rather, it should be "said, of those who in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt spoke the Arabic tongue and represented Arabic learning, notions borrowed from Greeks, Copts, and Persians, and foreign to the soil of the primitively incredulous Arabia.

Thus a new body of tradition was got together of a mixed if not altogether spurious kind, which it is more accurate to call Mohammedan than truly Arabian, and which has been repeated by every subsequent writer on Arabian matters until it has become almost impossible to distinguish what is of value in it and what worthless. A vast number of tales relating to horses are included among them, and these it will be necessary to examine for what they may be worth, but always with distinct reserve.

Wherever there is a religious colouring to a tale thus related it is especially necessary to be upon one's guard, for there seems to have been hardly any limit placed on the powers of invention where advantage to the faith could be subserved by the teller. Otherwise I think that there is generally a solid substratum of fact to the traditions recorded, and the fiction is due less to the ill-faith of the compiler than to the Corruption of the popular voice caused by a too long absorption in religious discussions and theological extravagances.

The first point which comes out clearly in all these authors is that the ancient Arabs regarded the horse as being of two separate kinds or species. Whereas the general term "Kheyl" was applied to all horses, the special term "Faras" was used only of the true horse of Arabia; while for the horses of the rest of the world Hejjin was used, or more Commonly, the Persian word Berdhun. In their bestiaries, or accounts of various animals, they always made this distinction, placing the two kinds of horses on precisely the same level with the two kinds of camel, the Arabian and the Bactrian (Bohkti), the two kinds of ox, the cow and the buffalo, and the two kinds of elephant, the Indian and the Abyssinian. This idea of the double origin of the horse was doubtless no more with the pre-Islamic Arabs than the tradition of a special tame breed, descended from a special wild breed peculiar to the Peninsula while the other was a breed of foreign importation. The two are to be distinguished, says Damiri, first by the different quality of the bone, which in the true Arab (Faras, or Faras Atik-the horse of ancient nobility) is of less volume but denser substance than in the Hejjin; and secondly by the form of the head, the true Arab having the type of the gazelle, the Berdhun that of the ram.

The distinction is precisely that which may be made to-day between the thorough-bred Arab horse and the unimproved horse of Europe; the profile of the gazelle being undulous with a concave dip between forehead and muzzle, while that of the ram is convex. Ram-headed (cabeza de carnero) is a term still applied in Spain to what in England we call the Roman-nosed type, which term Roman may itself have been adopted by us, with many other borrowings in horse matters, from the Arabs: Roum (Rome) is synonymous still among the Arabs with Europe. That the Arabs of the Peninsula, in the days of Ignorance, were well acquainted with both kinds of horses is abundantly clear, and even that for certain purposes the Berdhun was used by them. Their own horse (Faras) was their war-horse, used for no other purpose than war and the chase. He was the horse of the Bedouins, especially of the Bedouins of Nejd. But the townsmen of Yemen had also the Hejjin, which was an animal of recognized foreign extraction, useful to them for its ambling pace in their journeys, or where heavy weights had to be carried. They got these principally from Persia (whence the Persian name Berdhun, Berdan =Cold), but also occasionally from other quarters, as we read of two hundred Cappadocian horses being sent by Philostorgos to the Sabaens of Yemen, A.D. 408-450. Such Berdhuns, however, seem to have been confined to Yemen townsmen, whose connection with Persia and the rest of the outer world was an old one. There is no trace of their having ever been used in Nejd. There is no sign of them in the rock inscriptions of any part of Arabia, and they were probably unknown in earlier days. Such, I say, is what we may gather as the underlying truth of the traditions of the early Mohammedan writers as to the pre-Islamic Arabs. A mass, however, of what is clearly fiction has been superimposed by the necessity of giving a religious character to the facts related. Belonging to this category are notably the two tales so constantly repeated of the first wild horse having been captured and tamed by Ishmael, the son of Abraham, ancestor of the Ishmaelitish Arabs, and of the same horses having been first given to the Bedouins by Solomon.

The Islamic fiction says : "I name thee Horse, I establish thee as one of the glories of the Earth. ... I give thee flight without wings." These words are stated to have been included in an address by the Divine Majesty to the Horse immediately on its creation out of a handful of South Wind.

Adam, having been told to make a choice amongst all living beings, made choice of the horse, on which he received a promise of blessings and glory for himself and his posterity for all time.

According to a tradition, said by Abdallah ibn Yezid el Halali to have been transmitted through El Wakidi, the first of Adam's posterity who mounted the horse, was Ishmael ibn Ibrahim (Abraham). Since the Creation horses had been in a wild state. "Before him the horse was wild. ...The horses Ishmael rode were Arab horses."

El Kelbi is quoted as relating that the Most High made a hundred horses of pure race come out of the sea for the prophet Solomon, and these had been given the name of "Blessing." (Possibly some echo of an importation from Bahreyn.)

And as to King Solomon's horses, El Kelbi is stated to have said that they numbered a thousand, all "Safinat," or pure bred, and that one day, while they were being paraded before the king, the joy of looking at them made him forget the hour of prayer. In remorse he drew his sword and killed nine hundred of them; the remnant of one hundred happened not to have been led out, and thus escaped destruction. This fable makes no account of the Islamic "hour of prayer" being non-existent in Solomon's time!

In Yakute's Geographical Dictionary (vol. i, p. 138), under Ajyad, one finds the tale of wild horses and Ismall as dictated to Badia ibn Abdallah el Hamadani, by Abdu'l Huseyn Ahmed Ibn Faris. That true-bred horses were inaccessible, like the rest of the wild animals, and were seen nowhere else than in the land of the Arabs; none went forth to ride them, nor did it occur to the mind of anyone to tie them up. They were in great honour. This is the substratum of all the traditions and remains unaltered as a foundation for superimposed myths.

This is the myth of Ishmael: " 'In the beginning,' says El Naseri, 'the horse was wild in his condition, as are the other wild beasts beyond the obedience of Man. Ishmael, the son of Abraham, was the first who mounted the horse, the first to whom God gave him in obedience. ...' According to a saying which has come down to us from Ali it is from the Prophet that the following tradition comes. When God thought Him to create the horse He said to the South Wind: 'Of thy substance will I make me a new being for the glory of my chosen ones, the shame of my enemies and a robe for them that serve me.' And the wind said: 'Be that Being made.' And God took, as it were, a handful of wind and said to it: 'I create thee, O Arabian. To thy forelock I bind victory in battle-on thy back I set a rich spoil, and a treasure on thy loins. ...'Or according to another manner of telling, God said to the wind: 'Be thou gathered together .' And the wind was gathered together. And the Angel Gabriel took of it a handful and said to the Lord: 'Behold, my hand is full.' And God created of the handful of wind a horse of chestnut colour, like gold, and said to the horse: 'Behold, I have created thee and made thee Arabian, and thou shalt have station and power above all things of the beasts that are subject to Man. And I have bound all fortune and a treasure to thy loins, and on thy back a rich spoil, and to thy forelock a fair issue.' And God set loose the fast runner, and he went on his way neighing. And the Lord said: 'o red one, thy neighings shall bring terror to the unbelievers., Fill for them. their ears with the sound.of thy voice, make them to tremble before thee. ...And again, in another place, El Nasen says : 'Ishmael was the first who mounted the horse. Before him the horse was wild. Now when God permitted Ibrahim and Ishmael to build from its foundation the sanctuary of Mekka, He said to His servants: "Behold, a treasure which I have prepared for you from the beginning. Go forth now, Ishmael, to the tops of the hills." But he knew not what he should call nor what it was that had been promised him. And God told Ishmael the words that he should speak. And there was no horse from all the upper surfaces of Arabia that did not answer to the words of Ishmael. And they ran towards him and put their manes beneath his hand and yielded themselves to his will.' "

In this legend, fantastic as it is in its details, there would seem to be some solid truth embedded which had been preserved by current tradition, or it would hardly have been put forward for public acceptance in a land so critical of horse lore and of its own genealogies. The points of interest in it are, first, the colour given to the horse, asfar, which is used either for light chestnut or light grey or the mixture which precedes white and which is the traditional colour of the wild horse. The comparison to "gold," however, suggests real chestnut.

A second point lies in the naming of Ishmael as the original first tamer, rather than Kahtan, or any other of the Arabian ancestors. Here, too, there is probably a well-founded tradition, not indeed as to Ishmael himself, for the Bible suggests that he and his immediate descendants were camel breeders only, but to his later posterity who occupied Nejd before the Kahtanite migration of the second century A.D. We may perhaps see in the description of Ishmael's going up to the "tops of the hills," and the horses coming to him from the upper surfaces of Arabia, an allusion to the Ishmaelite removal to the Nejd horse-breeding plateau. The date of this may have been any time between 2000 and 1500 B.C.

The second Islamic tradition is that which concerns Solomon. This, like the other, would seem to be the dressing up of some vague recollection of the past in the garments of the new religion.

The legend of King Solomon runs thus :
Daoud [David], King of Israel, had a great love of horses. Whensoever he heard of a strong runner, one of pure blood, he sent for him. This holy prophet gathered thus together one thousand horses of the best. From him Solomon received the inheritance, and he said: 'There is nothing of my father's possessions so dear to me as these horses.' And Solomon made them to run for money.

Then follows the aforesaid myth of King Solomon killing the horses, the beauty of which distracted him from prayer. One of the horses which remained was said to have been Zad el Rakib, given by him later to the Beni Azd, and about which there is a long-winded and tiresome story which it is impossible to translate into serious history and appears to be the garbled remnants of a fairy tale.

It is only when we reach the pre-Islamic genealogies that Lady Anne Blunt says :

"Here one seems to come upon a tradition purely Arab and to be on comparatively firm ground, leaving Zad el Rakib to float as a figure-head in a glimmering background of mirage."

It is essential to an understanding of real tradition that we should be rid of these myths, which are just the highly coloured inventions which European writers have so eagerly repeated, but which have no more authority as real history than Greek mythology.

Note.-Lady Anne had a great admiration for many of the reforms instituted by the prophet, such as the fundamental worship of Almighty God, the destruction of Idols, prohibition of drink, restriction of polygamy and abolition of the horrible Arabian practice of burying girl babies alive. She is on page 94 referring to the misplaced zeal of his followers, who became fanatically anxious to twist anything and everything into religious fairy tales and to dramatize facts accordingly.