2 famous arabian horses that started the throughbred horse?

Question

2 famous arabian horses that started the throughbred horse?

Answer 1

The Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian were two of the three founding sires of the Thoroughbred breed.  The third stallion, also an arab horse, was known as the Byerly Turk.

Answer 2

There were actually 3 of them- the Goldolphin Arabian, The Byerly Turk, and the Darley Arabian. There is also a fair amount of historical debate as to whether or not a 4th horse, called the Alcock Arabian, should also be included in this list. The Alcock Arabian was responsible for introducing the dapple gray and dark gray colors into the Thoroughbred breed. All of the horses who are gray or who have gray genes, are descended in some way from this stallion. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The issue of the origins of the Thoroughbred breed is more complicated than just the "three foundation sires" answer that is usually presented.

The Godolphin Arabian (or Barb-- some historians feel that he is more properly deemed a Barb, or "Barbary horse", than an Arabian in the true sense), the Darley Arabian and the Byerly Turk (whose line is now all but extinct in the US) are deemed the "foundation sires" of the breed, but the truth is that there are a number of other Arabian or eastern stallions that contributed as much (or more) genetic worth than the "big three."

Thoroughbred breeding is, in some ways, rather arcane in the way it considers thing.  Descent through the top male line is considered to have more importance than descent through the "collateral lines" of the pedigree.  The "big three" (Godolphin, Byerly, Darely) are the stallions from which the top-line descendance of all Thoroughbreds is found.  

Genetically, there is no reason why top-line descendance is more important than collateral-line descendance.  And in the collateral lines, there are many other interesting and quality Arabian, Barb, Turk and other eastern imports that were involved in the development of the Thoroughbred breed.  This website gives some interesting information on these:  http://www.tbheritage.com/HistoricSires/...

Truth is, when you discuss the earliest origins of the Thoroughbred, things can get somewhat hazy.  Sometimes there is more than one stallion that went by a particular name;  sometimes in the records, horses are not referred to by name (e.g., "Barbary stallion at the Earl of Blank stud"), sometimes descriptions of horses are vague; and sometimes pedigrees are not as they are represented, because of mistakes in transcribing pedigree information, mistakes in breeding mares to the wrong stallions, or sometimes outright fraud on the part of the breeder.  

(In the earliest days of Thoroughbred breeding, the stud groom received a payment for his part in assisting in the breeding operation.  Stud grooms regarded this perk as an important part of their compensation.  It is recorded anecdotally that some stud grooms, if the stallion a mare was to be bred to was unavailable-- e.g., if more than one mare came into heat on the same day and the stallion could only breed one mare, or the stallion was for some reason indisposed or unavailable when a mare came into heat-- the stud groom would get the mare covered by some other stallion in order to get his payment for assisting in the breeding operation, with no one the wiser about the parentage of the foal that was conceived in this way.  So for a variety of reasons, early pedigrees of Thoroughbreds have to be taken with a grain of salt.)

Check out the website I referenced, it has some fascinating information about lesser-known forefathers of the Thoroughbred breed.  

Further reading for those interested:  the biographies of Lady Anne Blunt and Sir Wilfred Blunt details their hunt for Arabian horses in the mid-1800's.  While this is over a century later than the days when Arabians were imported into England to found the Thoroughbred breed, reading about the Blunts' adventures in Arabia gives some insight into the early origins of the Arabian breed.