The horse; with a treatise of draught / [William Youatt].

  • William Youatt
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The horse; with a treatise of draught / [William Youatt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/600 page 22
    with that animal. Five hundred years after that, Solomon imported spices, gold, and silver, from Arabia *; but all the horses for his own cavalry and chariots, and those with which he supplied the Phoenician monarchs, he pro¬ cured from Egyptt. There is a curious record of the commerce of different countries at the close nf the second century. Among the articles exported from Egypt to Arabia, and particularly as presents to reigning monarchs, were horses. In the fourth century, two hundred Cappadocian horses were sent by the Roman emperor as the most acceptable present he could offer a powerful prince of Arabia. So late as the seventh century the Arabs had few horses, and these of little value ; for when Mahomet attacked the Koreish near Mecca, he had but two horses in his whole army : and at the close of his murderous campaign, although he drove off twenty-four thousand camels and forty thousand sheep, and carried away twenty-four thousand ounces of silver, not one horse appears in the list of plunder. These circumstances sufficiently prove that, however superior may be the present breed, it is comparatively lately that the horse was naturalised in Arabia. Indeed the Arabs do not deny this ; for until within the last century, when their horses began to be so deservedly valued, they were content to limit their pedigree to one of the five on which Mahomet and his four immediate successors fled from Mecca to Medina on the night of the Hegira. Although in the seventh century the Arabs had no horses of value, yet those which they had derived from their neighbours began then to be preserved with so much care, and propagated so uniformly and strictly from the finest of the breed, that in the thirteenth century the Arabian horse began to assume a just and unrivalled celebrity. There are now said to be three breeds or varieties of Arabian horses : the Attechi, or inferior breed, on which the natives set little value, and which are found wild on some parts of the deserts; the Kadischi, literally horses of an unknown race, answering to our half-bred horses—a mixed breed; and the Kochluni, horses whose genealogy, according to the modern exaggerated accounts, has been cultivated during two thousand years. Many written and attested pedigrees extend, with true Eastern exaggeration, to the stud of Solomon. The Kuchlani are principally reared by the Bedouin Arabs in the remote deserts. A stallion may be procured without much difficulty, although at a great price. The Arabs imagine that the female is more concerned than the male in the excellence and value of the produce, and the genealogies of their horses are ahvaj's traced through the dam. The Arab horse would not be acknowledged by every judge to possess a perfect form. The head, however (like that which is delineated in the title- page), is inimitable. The broadness and squareness of the forehead ; the small¬ ness of the ears ; the prominence and brilliancy of the eye ; the shortness and fineness of the muzzle; the width of the nostril; the thinness of the lower jaw, and the beautifully developed course of the veins,—will always characterise the head of the Arabian horse. The cut in the title-page is the portrait of the head of a black Arabian presented to William IV. by the Imaum of Muscat. It is a close and honest likeness. The muzzle, the nostrils, and the eye, are inimitable. In the sale of the Hampton Court stud, in 1837, this animal realised 580 guineas ; it was bought for the King of Wiirtemberg, and is highly prized in Germany. The body of the Arab may, perhaps, be considered as too light, and his chest * 2 Chron. ix. 14. t 2 Chron. i. 17.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image