Bedouin Of The Sinai

The Sinai Peninsula links Asia and Africa and for millennia has been crossed by imperial armies from both the east and the west. Thus, its Bedouin inhabitants are by necessity involved in world affairs and maintain a complex, almost urban, economy. They make their home in arid mountains that provide limited pastures and lack arable soils and must derive much of their income from migrant labor and trade. Still, every household maintains, at considerable expense, a small orchard and a minute flock of goats and sheep. The orchards and flocks sustain them in times of need and become the core of a mutual assurance system. It is for this social security that Bedouin live in and retire to the mountains. Based on fieldwork over ten years, this book builds on the central theoretical understanding that the complex political economy of the Mount Sinai Bedouin is integrated into urban society and part of the modern global world.

A collection of reports from archaeological excavations and surveys carried out, some by the author himself, since the diverse Sinai desert was opened up to Israeli researchers in 1967. The excavations include Nabotean sites and fortresses, an Iron Age fortress and an 8th-century BCE Israelite settlement. There is also a landscape survey of the hills of Northwestern Sinai. The smaller second section contains studies of `Desert Kites', triangular hunting enclosures, in the Sinai and Southern Negev, Sinai rock inscriptions and past and present desert nomads.

Bedouin Law from Sinai and the Negev is the first comprehensive study of Bedouin law published in English, including oral, pre-modern law. The material for the book, collected over the course of forty years of field work by Clinton Bailey, one of the world's leading scholars on Bedouin culture, is of permanent scholarly value. Bailey shows how a nomadic desert-dwelling society provides for its own law and order in the traditional absence of any centralized authority or law enforcement agency to protect it. This comprehensive picture of Bedouin law, offers readers a unique opportunity to understand Bedouin law by highlighting the close connection between the law and the culture from which it emerged.

The book presents an overall picture of the ancient customs of the Bedouin people of the Middle East but mainly focuses on the contemporary life of the tribes of South Sinai, Egypt, of which tourism is an important part. It also looks at development in Sinai and the efforts to make it sustainable, as well as how the Bedouin fit - and could fit - in it. The book also has a personal aspect, as the author had lived the larger part of a decade with the Bedouin in St. Catherine and worked, or was involved in other ways, with several projects during the years between 2005 and 2016. The book contains over 150 photos (black-and-white), most taken in this period, but also some rare historic ones. They give the topics a visual dimension and pay tribute to the people of Sinai.

The desert-dwelling Bedouin have always been a subject of intense fascination. Their culture and ethics are still largely a mystery, both for the peoples with whom they share the Middle-Eastern and African lands, and for those living in the West. Like other non-literate peoples, the Bedouinhave a strong oral tradition and use poetry for many forms of communication and entertainment. Clinton Bailey has spent the last twenty years among the Bedouin of Sinai and the Negev studying their culture and recording their poems as recited around campfires. This book presents the fruit of hiswork: 113 poems reflecting Bedouin attitudes to a variety of personal, social, and political experiences. Each poem is translated into English, appears in Arabic script and transliteration, and is accompanied by an introduction and notes on the cultural, linguistic, and historical background. Thisthorough and original study makes a vital contribution to our knowledge of the Bedouin, and will be of great interest to Arabists, anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and all those who visit this part of the Arab world.Dr Bailey has has lectured on Bedouin culture and history at various universities, and is a founder of the Museum of Bedouin Culture in the Negev.

After publishing A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume. To facilitate direct comparison of all Sinai dialects, the dialect descriptions in both volumes run parallel and are thus structured in the same manner. Quoting from his own extensive material and using a total of 95 criteria for comparison, De Jong applies the method of 'multi-dimensional scaling' and his own 'step-method' to arrive at a subdivision into eight (of which seven are 'Bedouin') typological groups in Sinai. An appendix with 68 maps and dialectrometrical plots completes the picture.