Human beings are distinguished one from another by many physical and intellectual differences. They are further divided by other things, the formost being geography. So the entire world is inhabited by human beings of many descriptions, and this is unlikely to change. Perhaps it never will.
In what we call "the modern world" (a poor choice of words), we tend to think our level of civilization, education, and grasp of scientific reality is superior to the less civilized, less educated, and less scientifically aware.
While we say that "all men are created equal", we actually believe it is not entirely true. This statement has come to mean that all human beings are created with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
EARLY 1900
Lawrence begins his tale in the early 1900's. Egypt and the Sudan were on one side of the Red Sea, and Arabia was on the other. The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had nearly abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The women of the settlements were of "raddled meat" not palatable to a man of healthy parts. The horror of such sordid commerce caused men to indifferently slake one another's few needs in their own clean bodies. This was more of a cold convenience that seemed sexless, and even pure. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, theirs or someone else's. They pursued any habit which promised physical pain or filth. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pains, the sorrow of punishment had to be pitiless. Arabs wrote their lesson with gun or whip immediately in the sullen flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal. The desert did not afford the refined slow penalties of courts and jails.
The Arab ways were hard from birth. For strangers coming to their lands they were terrible. Arabs suffered the cruel rather than the beautiful. A major difficulty is to say just who the Arabs were. Being a manufactured people, their name has been changing for years. Once it mean't Arabian, and there was a country called Arabia, and a language called Arabic. It was the tongue of Syria and Palestine, of Mesopotamia, and the great peninsula called Arabia on the map. Before the Moslem conquest, these areas were inhabited by diverse peoples, speaking languages of the Arabic family. We incorrectly called them Semitic". However, Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac were related tongues that indicated, or at least suggested, a common origin.
THE LAND
The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough parallelogram. The north side ran from Alexandria on the Mediterranean, across Mesopotamia eastward to the Tigris river. The south side was the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Muscat. On the west it was bounded by the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to Aden. On the east by the Tigris, and the Persian Gulf to Muscat.
HOME OF THE SEMITES
This square of land, as large as India, formed the homeland of the Semites, in which no foreign race had ever kept a permanent footing. Only in Tripoli of Africa, and the everlasting miracle of Jewry, had distant Semites kept some of their identity and force. The origin of these peoples, the Semites, is an academic question.Their present social and political differences can only be partly grasped by looking at the geography. In the west the mountains of Syria, Palestine, Hejaz and Yemen, who, time and again entered into the current of European life. Ethically these hills were more in Europe, not in Asia, but on the plains toward the east and south, Arabs looked to the Mediterranean and not to the Indian Ocean, for their cultural sympathies, for their enterprises, and particularly for their expansions.
POPULATION PRESSURES
In the north (Syria) the birth rate was low, and the death rate high, largely because of the unsanitary conditions and hectic lifestyles of the majority. So population growth was slow. In Lebanon, where sanitation had been improved, a greater exodus of youth took place to America, and thus population growth was relieved. In Yemen the solution was quite different. There was no foreign trade nor industries to accommodate the growing population. Living standards declined and a congestion of numbers was felt. The towns were simple market towns, as clean and simple as most ordinary villages, but the population was bursting and could not emigrate overseas. The only option for them was move to the Sudan. An even worse country than Arabia.
WHERE TO GO They could not move northward along the hills for these were barred by the Holy town of Mecca and it's port Jidda. This alien belt, continually reinforced by strangers from India and Bokhara and Africa, was violently strong and extremely hostile to the Semitic consciousness. A few Arab tribes ventured across the Red Sea to Sudan, and were compelled to modify their Semitic culture profoundly in order to exist.Behind them, back in Yemen, the increasing congestion found it's only relief toward the east, south of the Wahhabis tribes in the north. These weaker clans exchanged good springs for bad, fertile palms for places where agricultural life became impossible. They then began to practice a precarious husbandry by breeding sheep and camels. As time passed they came to depend more and more on these herds for their support.
FINALLY The pastoral border people were pushed out of the oasis areas into the inhospitable and untrodden wilderness as Nomads. The areas below Mecca and Taif are crowded with the names of 50 or more tribes, now gone from there, which may be found today in Nejd, Jebel Shammer, in the Hamid, even on the frontiers of Syria and Mesopotamia. This area became the real source of migration, the factory of Nomads, the springing of the gulf-stream of desert wanderers.
ECONOMIC STANDARDS Life in the desert was based on the supply of camels, which were best bred on the upland pastures with their supply of strong nutritive thorns. By the camel industry the Bedouins (desert Arabs) molded their lives, apportioned their tribal areas, and kept the clans revolving through spring, summer, fall, and winter pastureages. The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt determined the population which deserts could support. The desert population was regulated by their standard of living.
COMPARISON It's difficult for people living in modern circumstances to visualize the Arab way of life as it was from 1900 to 1925. A huge majority of Arab children came into a world of scarce and contaminated water, an extremely limited variety of foods, and rare natural medications, (if any). He or she would live on sand, rock shelters or dried mud flats, in caves or tents often covered or floored with filthy rugs and rags.
They believed a girl child was born to work for men and the tribe, and was carefully controlled by the mother. The main job of both girls and women was to take care of men.
Boy children were cared for and controlled by mothers, the older girls and other women, but only until they could become working members of the tribe. At that time their fathers became responsible for their behavior, work, and abilities.
Both boy and girl children became useful to the tribe when they were very young, commonly at the age of six or seven years. Girls were taught to prepare food, clean up, repair fabrics, butcher meats, pick grasses, grains, and flowers for food, and pack to move on. Boys were taught to care for themselves, to hunt and to find foods, to kill animals, to force others to do their will, and to be both brave and brutal. There were few roads; essentially none. Just landmarks to search for, crude marked paths, well roads, and trails and to their next destination. There were no schools, no effort to learn mathematics, or even languages other than their own, or any of what we now call "the sciences". The major vocation/occupation/industry of a Arab (Bedouin) tribe was animal husbandry. Tribes were mainly involved with Camels, Sheep, and/or Goats. These animals were each of great importance; for transportation, bearing cargo, and for food.
Camels particularly were also the bedrock of their wealth. In their constant movement to find grazing ground, food, and game, Bedouin Arab tribes moved relentlessly about the desert. During decade after decade they were gradually pushed northward At a slow pace they climbed the ladder of western oasis toward Syria, many tribes found the edges of cultivation as they moved toward Mesopotamia. Many of the tribes struck out toward vast lands of rivers where they became riverine Arabs of the lower Euphrates. Lastly, they began to sow crops, if only a little barley for their animals. They gathered in villages, settled, and were no longer considered wandering desert Bedouins. But new tribes continued to arrive. Soon came vicious arguments over property, animal ownership, and who was the boss. Slowly the settlements became victims of ravages brought by the Arab nomads that arrived later.
So, we see clans, born in the highlands of Yemen, thrust by stronger clans into the desert, where, unwillingly, they became nomads to keep themselves alive. They wandered as before, every year moving a little further north or a little further east as chance sent them down one or the other of the well roads of the wilderness.
