Back to XenophonThe origins of the Arabian Horse: Professor Ridgeway and Lady WentworthThe concept of the Arab horse as separate from all other breeds has seen two main protagonists in the twentieth century: Professor Ridgeway and Lady Wentworth. Both, for radically different reasons, maintained that the Arab was not merely a distinctive breed, but actually a separate species. Ridgeway, basing his conclusions principally on coat colour, and on a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the post-Islamic "El Khamsa" legend, called it Equus libycus. Lady Wentworth, by contrast, drew hers from osteological evidence, from the Arab's so-called "unique" skeletal peculiarities, calling her construct Equus Arabicus [sic]. Unfortunately, both relied too heavily on shaky evidence and unproven assumptions.
Professor Ridgeway Ridgeway held that there was 'the clearest evidence of the existence in Libya of a fine breed of horses for a thousand years before the Arabs ever bred a horse.' ( Ridgeway, Professor William: The Origin and Influence of the Thoroughbred Horse, 1905, p.5). Since no one knows exactly when the Arabs first bred horses this is a non sequitur; and further, Ridgeway offers no concrete evidence - other than a lot of waffle about the incidence of various colours and some confusing forays into Egyptian history - to back up his assertion that it was from Libya that the Arabs obtained their horses. He states that the absence of horses in Arabia noted by classical authors is confirmed by native Arab traditions, but offers no evidence in support of this - and indeed it is directly contradicted by Lady Anne Blunt's researches into bedawin traditions. Ridgeway further states - again without producing a shred of evidence - that grey or white horses are 'sure signs of much Upper Asiatic [i.e. non-Arab] blood.' (Ridgeway, p.206). Unfortunately for Ridgeway, his ideas about the occurrence of certain coat colours were quickly disproved with the rediscovery, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of Mendelian genetics. Further, his book was riddled with inconsistencies - a fact pointed out on numerous occasions, with great glee, by Lady Wentworth. She also drew attention to the professor's shaky standards of proof. But what about her own? Do they stand up to close scrutiny? Lady Wentworth was undoubtedly very gifted and intelligent, and her combination of knowledge, experience and intuition resulted in some of the finest Arab horses ever bred. However, her enthusiasm for the Arabian horse, and her desire to promote the breed's wonderful qualities, often led her astray in her historical and scientific arguments. Unlike her mother, Lady Anne Blunt (whose scholarship was meticulous), Lady Wentworth had a somewhat cavalier way with facts, which could be stretched beyond credibility, distorted, or simply ignored if it suited her argument to do so. Like Professor Ridgeway, she crams so much information into her books that sometimes the reader's head spins; unlike Ridgeway, however, she frequently gives only the vaguest indication of her sources. Given that Lady Wentworth badly misquotes some of these sources, and that she seriously misrepresents both the fossil record and the work of those who collected and identified equine fossil remains, this makes me feel very uneasy about her use of historical and scientific material.
Lady Wentworth: painting by Neville S. Lytton Lady Wentworth inherited her combativeness and her tendency to dogmatic argument from her father, the immensely gifted and erratically colourful Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Being very much her father's daughter, she took on the scientific establishment of her day with gusto. Defying all the rules of taxonomy as laid down by the International Code for Zoological Nomenclature (published in 1906 to clarify existing procedures), she proclaims that the Arab 'must not be considered as derived from a different species, but as actually being a different species, Equus Arabicus [sic]. There was never anything from which his unique skeletal peculiarities could have been derived.' (Wentworth, Lady (Judith Anne Dorothea Lytton), The Authentic Arabian Horse, 3rd ed. 1962, p.239) But the Arab's supposed skeletal peculiarities are neither unique nor invariably found even in Arabs. Stecher, for example, estimates that approximately 4 out of 7 Arabs have 17 thoracic vertebrae as opposed to 18 (quoted in Groves & Willoughby, 'Studies on the taxonomy and phylogeny of the genus Equus', in Mammalia, vol. 45 no.3, 1981. See also Gladys Brown Edwards, The Arabian: From War Horse to Show Horse , rev. ed. 1973, pp.27-28). Furthermore, there are whole groups of humans who have 'unique skeletal peculiarities' ( for example an isolated community in the Zambesi valley where the people have only two toes, as a result of a mutation which occurred several generations ago), but these are not classed as belonging to a separate species on that account. Apart from osteological peculiarities, much of Lady Wentworth's thesis depended on an outright rejection of the possibility of evolution. However, when we come to examine her arguments for such a rejection, we find that they are based on a series of popular and simplistic misconceptions about the nature of evolution. Not least of these is the idea that equates evolution with progress. But there is nothing in the concept of evolution which requires such a notion; evolution simply means change (Lady Wentworth states confidently that 'Nature abhors change' (Thoroughbred Racing Stock, 2nd ed., 1960, p.404) - a statement which could be successfully challenged, with millions of examples to the contrary, by any moderately competent naturalist, zoologist, botanist or geologist). She cites very few contemporary sources; with one or two exceptions, almost all her scientific material is out of date by several decades, if not more. Even allowing for the timescale involved in producing her monumental books, surely she was able to update her sources had she wished to do so? The effect this omission has on her arguments is disastrous. For instance, right up to her last publication she clung to the ancient idea of blood being the medium for the transmission of inherited characteristics. Blood cells do carry genetic coding, but so does every other cell in a multi-celled organism. And blood types in themselves are no indicators of excellence or otherwise. This was well known at the time Lady Wentworth wrote her books, so why did she hang on to a discredited idea? In fact, although she shows some flashes of insight - the insight of a true breeder - into the mechanics of inheritance, she makes no mention (other than a brief reference to chromosomes) of genetics as such. Yet the 1920s and 1930s saw the publication of a number of fine books on genetics and evolution by great scientists such as Ronald Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane; while from the beginning of the century right through to Lady Wentworth's death, numerous papers on equine genetics appeared in various scientific journals. So why does she appear to have taken no advantage of them? For example, she states that we cannot identify 'why the mule will not breed when mated back to what is considered osteologically his own kind.' (Thoroughbred Racing Stock, 2nd ed., p.403) Yet the reason was known when she wrote that, and indeed it had been known for some time. It has to do with chromosomes. The various species of equid have different numbers of chromosomes; for example the domestic horse has 64, the onager 56, Grevy's zebra 46, the mountain or Hartmann's zebra 32, etc; this, together with differing locations of genes along the chromosomes, and different shapes of some of the chromosomes themselves, is why most equid hybrids are infertile. About 99% of human and chimpanzee DNA is identical, but the tiny part of DNA that actually codes genetically differs by as much as 10%. That is enough to separate us into different species. Among domestic horses, however, the genetic differences between the various breeds are much, much smaller than those between humans and chimps. They are similar to the distinctions between Africans, Europeans, Mongoloid peoples, etc. Differences in the phenotype (outward appearance of an individual), however pronounced, may not reflect the genotype (genetic makeup of an individual). For this and other reasons, only the most committed racist would nowadays attempt to assign Africans, Europeans, etc. to different species . In the same way the various breeds of horse, no matter how distinctive their appearance, cannot be separated into different species (see Ann T. Bowling, Horse Genetics, 1996, p. 146). Ultimately, perhaps, Lady Wentworth found it impossible to abandon her cherished ideas about her beloved breed, and this was what led her to disregard or dismiss so much of the scientific evidence. This is understandable, if hardly excusable. But if we genuinely seek the truth regarding the origins of the Arabian horse, we cannot rely on Ridgeway's assumptions about colour, nor on Lady Wentworth's historical and scientific assertions, though they are useful as bases from which scholars may do their own digging. There are no easy answers here! Perhaps we shall never know the truth; there may simply not be enough information available to us. Or it may be that further advances in our understanding of equine genetics force us to discard some of our most cherished notions. Even now, the preliminary results of research into equine DNA being carried out at the University of Kentucky have prompted some breed societies to claim their breed as the 'ancestor' of the Arabian. Was this ancestor the Akhal-Teke, as some maintain? Or was it the Caspian, as others insist? Is it not rather more likely that, instead of following a straight line of descent (i.e. Akhal-Teke to Arabian, or Caspian to Arabian), all three breeds instead descend from a common ancestry? This latter possibility is what the evidence so far actually suggests. Perhaps eventually genetic research will indeed reveal the answers. For now we must keep an open mind - but not so open that the brains fall out! İLesley Skipper
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