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Arabia to Egypt Horses were introduced into Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (about 1700-1550 BC). The earliest remains of horses are a few bones from Avaris and the skeleton of a horse found at Buhen. The Buhen remains date to the early Second Intermediate Period, but this date is disputed. In the wars between the Theban 17th Dynasty and the Hyksos, both sides used horses. In later times, the kingdom of Kush in the Sudan was famous for its horses, perhaps in part due to good grazing grounds in areas of the Upper Nubia. In the Victory Stela of King Piy, special mention is made of the royal attention to horses. In the New Kingdom, horses were animals of the military elite and the ruling class. In general, Egyptians did not ride on horses but used them for chariots. Two horses are the rule. Horseshoes were not used. Egyptian horses, which were probably almost identical to those in the Near East, were rather small by comparison with modern horses.
Some of the most well known depictions of Egyptian horses are from the friezes and murals found on the walls of the temples and ancient cities of the pharoahs of Egypt. These are Egyptian horses and they were key to the power of the Pharaohs. For thousands of years the horse evolved, was domesticated, and carefully bred in Egypt as well as Arabia. These ancient horses were not imported from Arabia, they were native Egyptian stock. They were plentiful at one time yet what happened to them? Today's Egyptian horses are descended from Arabian stock collected by Mohamed Ali, Abbas Pasha, his son Ibrahim's nephew Ali Pasha Sherif, and other great breeders from the 19th and 20th centuries. What happened to that original stock? (No, really. I am still trying to find out.) When you scan the history of Egypt, you soon realize that one conquering empire after another occupied Egypt from the time of Cleopatra's death to the pan-Arabia efforts of Nasser. For thousands of years, armies that depended on horses rode over the land of the pharaohs and in all probability the blood of the original Egyptian horses was completely diluted by that of the invading hordes. The beautiful horses depicted on the walls of the Pharaoh's tombs must have been all but lost for Mohamed Aly and subsequent breeders to spend their fortunes searching the vast Arabian peninsula looking for the best of the purebred Arabian horses to use as the foundation for their own breeding programs. Other factors might also have dealt the final blow. Around the turn of the 19th century, great pressures affected the number of horses being bred in the Middle East. Hundreds of years of war, drought, increasing mechanization, and perhaps disease, had drastically reduced the number of horses in Africa and the Middle East. I have found reference to the "horse plague", which may have been the African Horse Sickness (AHS), an insect vectored virus that killed thousands of horses during the period 1819 - 1953. There were 10 major epidemics of AHS during this period. An interesting side note -- of the ten epidemics, nine were in years of El Nino. In such years a large body of warm water crosses the Pacific ocean from west to east and disrupts rainfall patterns around the world. In this area, rainfall tends to be greatly increased during El Nino years, allowing a population explosion of C imicola , the midge that acts as vector of this and other equine diseases. I mention this because global warming has increased the frequency of El Nino which increases the frequency of conditions conducive to more epidemics. Had the original Egyptian horses been wiped out or declined in quality so much that they were not considered good enough to be called purebred? The people that gave us today's Egyptian horses were men of power and wealth with the means to obtain any horse they wanted. Did they select horses from Bedouin breeders because they simply had a passion for them, or were there no horses of quality left in Egypt by that time? What happened to the horses that were in Egypt before Mohamed Ali? That is one of the questions for which I continue to search for answers.
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