122 The Arabian Horse. 



dering their submission, or, rather, making alHances, as 

 many of them did so to suit their own convenience, and 

 did not really believe in him as a prophet. They had 

 been watching with interest the results of his protracted 

 war and disputes with the Koreish. 



Again, during the reign of Omar, the second Caliph, 

 Abu Obeidah, his commander-in-chief, after the battle 

 of Yermouk — which decided the fate of Syria — in the 

 division of the spoil, made a distinction between horse 

 and foot, and between those who were mounted on 

 Arabian horses and those who rode horses of a foreign 

 breed. All cavalry in general had three times the value 

 in spoils to what the infantry had ; but the owner of a 

 true Arabian horse had a double portion to what the 

 master of any other horse had. This was in the fifteenth 

 year of the Hegira, very shortly after the death of Mo- 

 hammed, and it proves that Arabian horses were neither 

 scarce nor of little value in the sixth and the beginning 

 of the seventh centuries. If there had been only a few 

 horses in Arabia, and those of no value, in Mohammed's 

 time, it would have been impossible, in so short a period 

 as fifteen years, to have established a breed of such 

 great value and well-acknowledged superiority as the 

 trne Arabian horse. 



Moreover, Abd-el-Kader, the celebrated Emir in 

 Africa, has stated that the Arabian horse was taken 

 into Africa anterior to Islam by two Herimetic tribes, 

 that the horses of the Sahara are their pure descendants, 

 and that the first family or race among them is the 

 Hamyan. It has been shown that IIam}'ar, who gave 



