Horse

Arabian horse: a breed raised by Bedouin tribes in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula for more than two thousand years, from which all modern Arabian horses descend. Its well-known populations include the “Desert-Bred” horses of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, the Straight Egyptian, and the Polish. Its classical type is distinguished by a concave (dished) head profile, wide-set eyes and a raised tail.

Hamdani is a maternal strain of purebred Arabian horses. A 2023 Saudi paper studied one Hamdani horse sampled at a private farm in Jeddah and found that its mitochondrial genome shares nucleotide substitutions with Hadban and that the phylogenetic tree shows a close relationship between them.

Shagya Arabians are a population of Arabian horses thought to descend from a Syrian stallion. A mitochondrial study shows shared maternal lineages between them and Syrian horses, suggesting a Syrian maternal contribution or recent gene flow.

Syrian Arabians are a native population of Arabian horses sampled in Syria for a mitochondrial study. They showed the greatest maternal lineage diversity among the populations in that study: individuals occurred in eight clades of the phylogenetic tree and in 12 of the 18 known major horse haplogroups.

The domestic horse is an equid with a long neck, a mane and a long-haired tail, and long limbs each ending in a single main hoof. Its breeds and individuals vary in coat colour and length and in the proportions of the head, chest and limbs, and the growing foal differs from the adult horse in its proportions.