Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 205 



appears in Babylonia first shortly before the middle of the 

 second millennium 1 ." 



The conclusions which I have drawn from the statements of 

 classical authors, and from the Old Testament, are confirmed 

 by the native Arab traditions. It seems certain that in the 

 centuries between the birth of Christ and the rise of Mu- 

 hammad the Arabs or at least some of the great men amongst 

 the tribes of South Arabia had become possessed of horses. 

 This can be demonstrated not only by many passages in the 

 old poets of the Ignorance, but also by inscriptional evidence. 

 Thus a great chief is termed fdris (i.e. cavalier, from faras, 

 a horse). A Sabaean inscription of uncertain date 2 , but in any 

 case considerably anterior to the time of Muhammad, states 

 that a small Arabian tribe (Hamdan) presented 'horses' 

 to someone whose name does not appear. There can be no 

 doubt that by the sixth century A.D. the Arabs were themselves 

 breeding horses, for in that period there was a famous horse 

 named Ddhis about whose breeding we have very full details, 

 as this animal was the cause of a war between two tribes 3 . 

 The inscription just cited is of the highest importance for the 

 history of the Arabian horse. It will be remembered that one of 

 the five strains of Al Khamseh is called Hamdan, and as there is 

 good reason to believe that in some cases at least these various 

 strains derive their names from families or tribes which bred 

 them, it seems more than probable that in the record of the 

 Hamdan tribe which possessed horses before the coming of 

 Muhammad we have the earliest historical reference to the 

 Kohl breed. 



That however even then horses were scarce and only 

 possessed by very few seems indicated by the fact that warriors 

 are described as riding on certain horses. Thus Nu'man, son of 

 Amraalgais, is described as "the rider (cavalier) of Hallma" 

 (fdrisu Halimata) 4 . According to the Anazah tradition 



1 H. v. Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth 

 Century (1903), p. 527. 



2 Mordtmann and Miiller, Sabdische Denkmaler (Vienna, 1883), no. 9, p. 35 ; 

 cf. note on p. 41. 



3 G. Jacobs, Altarabisches Beduinen-leben (2nd ed. Berlin, 1897), pp. 73 sq. 



4 Noldeke, Geschichte der Perser und Araber (translated from the Arabic of 

 Tabari), p. 79. 



