On Sunday, a majlis will be held in the library of Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi to celebrate a little-known but historically important text and an extraordinary life.
Sur les Chevaux Orientaux, et provenants des Races Orientales (On Oriental Horses and Those Descended from Eastern Breeds) records the exploits of Count Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski (1784-1831), a Polish nobleman and equine expert who travelled through the Middle East between 1817 and 1819.
A former soldier, Orientalist and patron of the arts, Count Rzewuski was the scion of an aristocratic dynasty of courtiers, politicians and generals but it was to the East, Arabian horses and the Bedouin that Rzewuski dedicated his career.
Thanks to tales told by one of his father's Arab stable hands and the influence of his uncle, the Egyptologist, ethnologist, linguist and writer Jan Potocki, the young Rzewuski was exposed to tales of the Orient from an early age. Later, while learning Arabic and Turkish at The Oriental Academy in Vienna, the young count also financed and edited Mines d'Orient, one of the first European journals of Oriental studies, but it is Rzewuski's unpublished manuscript that has proved to be his most enduring legacy.
On Oriental Horses is as much a work of travel writing and ethnography as a study in natural history and, for Vital Rambaud, the head of the French literature department at PSUAD and the host of Sunday's majlis, the manuscript deserves to be read more widely and understood as a work of literature.
“I had never heard about this book before I came to Abu Dhabi,” Rambaud explains. “What is interesting for me is that the manuscript is written in very good literary French, which makes it an example of the diffusion of the French language in the 19th century.”
Consisting of 505 pages of leather-bound manuscript, On Oriental Horses includes detailed descriptions of the best methods for the taming, care and breeding of Arabian horses as well as copious notes and illustrations of their anatomy, physiology, markings, pedigrees and breeds.
Rzewuski’s three volumes also record his travels through Ottoman Turkey and Syria, where the Count met the eccentric Lady Hester Stanhope, the self-styled “Queen of Palmyra”, and include more than 400 illustrations and maps as well as detailed observations of the Bedouin tribes of the Hejaz and Najd.
It was among these tribes, who referred to Rzewuski as Amir Taj al Fahar ’Abd al-Nishaani – “the Wreath of Fame, Servant of the Sign [of God]”, that the aristocrat discovered kindred spirits who shared his love of equestrianism and a mobile, martial life.
Rzewuski could not have embarked upon his journey to Arabia at a more important time.
The Napoleonic Wars had devastated many of Europe’s greatest stud farms, especially in Rzewuski’s ancestral homelands, and the continent’s bloodstock stood diminished at a time when high-quality horses were as strategically significant as cannon and muskets.
The other quality that made Arabians especially valuable was the fact that they had also developed as a singular breed, unlike European horses, a quality that made them uniquely consistent and predictable in the way they passed on their qualities to successive generations.
For several decades during the 19th century, On Oriental Horses was considered lost but it resurfaced in the collection of one of Rzewuski's descendants who deposited the manuscript with the Polish National Library in 1928.
It wasn’t until 2002, however, that extracts were published for the first time and the text started to reach an audience beyond academic and equestrian circles.
It was this version, Impressions d'Orient et d'Arabie. Un cavalier Polonais chez les Bédouins, edited by Bernadette Lizet and published by the illustrious independent publishing house José Corti, that formed the basis for the Arabic version that was published by Kalima in Abu Dhabi in 2013. The text was translated from French into Arabic by Hana Subhi, Rambaud's colleague at PSUAD and the co-host of the majlis. "It was very exciting for me to discover this man and reading the manuscript was like reading a detective story. I fell in love with him," says Subhi.
“He was supposed to stay in the desert for one month but he became fascinated by the Bedouin and their lives. Nobody really knows what became of him. Some people say that he was killed in a battle in Europe, others say he came back to Arabia and that he died in the desert. There were even witnesses who claimed to have seen him.”
Rambaud describes the majlis as “a start” and hopes the fact that it is being conducted in Arabic and French will help to attract the wider audience he believes Rzewuski deserves.
• The session will be conducted in French and Arabic at Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, on Sunday at 6pm. For more details, call 02 65 69 555 or visit www.sorbonne.ae.
Nick Leech is features writer at The National.