Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/240

212 the standard of Hosein, at Ardbeil, was made from a horse-shoe belonging to Abbas, uncle of Mohammed, by order of his daughter Fatima. "It was brought," says the legend, "from Arabia by Scheik Sed Reddeen, son of the holy Scheik Sofi, who was son of another holy villager, after the manner of the Moslem!" If the intention had been to advance a mere falsehood, it is to be wondered that Fatima, or the Prophet himself, should not have furnished a sacred shoe of one of the celebrated mares, from which sprung so many of the first breeds of Arabia, according to the assertions of devout Moslems. A horse-shoe most likely it was,' adds this writer, 'but how an uncle of Mohammed should possess horses when the Bein Koreish, as a tribe, were without, and the Prophet himself in the beginning of his career had only three, is quite another question.' It appears very unlikely that such an article as that shown in the Circassian brand-mark could ever have been employed as a shoe, or fixed to the hoof by the three clamps indicated above; but to show that the Lycian triquetra could not be intended to represent a horse-shoe, I have copied in figures 68, 69, 70, and 71, this and similar impressions of coins. Figure 69 is the plain triquetra, from the original in the British Museum, and resembling Col. Smith's (who is, I believe, the author of the article just quoted from) Circassian shoe, in having no dots or points; 70 is the triquetra that the writer refers to; the original is in the Bibliothèque at Paris, but a drawing of it is given in Sir Charles Fellows' work on the Coins of Lycia. It will be seen that the points could not