The name salūqī was that given by the Arabs, from, at the latest, the beginning of Islam, to the medium-sized gazehound with long pendulous ears which had hunted in the area of the Near and Middle East for perhaps thousands of years. As far as we are aware, the earliest occurrence of the word in Arabic literature is in a poem of Yazīd b. Dirār al-Muzarrid, who was born before Islam and who talks of banāt salūqiyyayn, ‘the offspring of two salūqīs’. Although the actual term salūqī does not, to my knowledge, occur in the classical hunting songs (ṭardiyyāt) of the Abbasid era, it is a word in general use in animal literature and that of the chase right through the medieval and late medieval periods. The word has survived to this day in the areas of the Arab World where the hound is still to be found, notably in the Hijaz and Najd areas of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.