246 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



obtain horses of large size, and we shall presently find that the 

 same principle has been always at work in medieval and modern 

 times. Thus in the Iliad the horses of Rhesus are commended 

 by Dolon as 'the largest' that he had ever seen, and the Nisaeari 

 horses of the Persian kings were ' the largest ' in Asia. Again, 

 we have seen that in modern times the Arab tribes of the 

 Persian Gulf have fatally injured their fine breed of horses by 

 crossing it with large Persian strains in order to produce for 

 the Indian market animals capable of carrying greater weight, 

 and we have also noticed that Niebuhr in the eighteenth 

 century preferred the half-bred horses of Syria to the Kochlani 

 (p. 167). It is more than probable that the same principle 

 was at work in Egypt from a comparatively early date, and 

 also in those parts of North Africa occupied by Greek and 

 Phoenician colonies. It will be presently shown that long 

 before the Christian era horses were imported into Libya from 

 Europe, and that in Roman times the North African horses 

 crossed with Spanish blood were especially esteemed. It is 

 therefore probable that in the horses of the Daphnae fragments 

 the Greek vase-painter has pourtrayed animals produced by 

 crossing the Libyan and the Asiatic horse, and we shall furnish 

 evidence of similar half-bred horses at Carthage, in Sicily, and in 

 Greece by the fifth century B.C. In fact the horses of Daphnae, 

 Carthage, Sicily, and Greece stood to the small slender uncrossed 

 horses of the Numidians in much the same relation as do the 

 coarse Arabian horses found to-day in Syria and Irak to the 

 pure-bred Keheilans. 



It is now clear that for many centuries before the Arabs 

 ever owned a horse, all the Libyan tribes possessed a most 

 notable breed, which in size, shape, speed, colour, and docility, 

 very closely resembled the Kohl breed of Arabia. As it has 

 been shown that Egypt was exporting horses into Asia Minor 

 in the time of Solomon, and that Arab tradition points to 

 Egypt as the region from whence the best horses were obtained 

 in the time of Muhammad, and as Egypt derived her horses in 

 great part from Libya, we are justified in concluding that the 

 ancestors of the Kohl breed of Arabia came from North Africa. 

 This conclusion is strongly corroborated by a fact already 



