Egypt : handbook for travellers / edited by K. Baedeker.

Date:
1885-1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egypt : handbook for travellers / edited by K. Baedeker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    shirt, and in winter a light-coloured striped woollen mantle, while the Bisharin and Hadendoa tend their large flocks of sheep and herds of camels in a half-naked condition, girded with a leathern apron and wrapped in a kind of blanket (melayeh). All these ‘Ethio- pians’ are Dolichocephali, with orthognathous skulls, and are re- markable for their fine and almost Caucasian cast of features, their very dark, bronze-coloured complexion, and their luxuriant growth of hair, shading their heads like a cloud, or hanging down in num- berless plaits over their necks and shoulders, while in front it is short and curly. Their figures are beautifully symmetrical, and more or less slender in accordance with their means of subsistence, and their limbs are gracefully and delicately formed. In other re- spects they resemble all the other children of the desert, as in the purity of their complexion, the peculiar thinness of their necks, and the premature wrinkling of the skin of their faces. Com- pared with their bold and quarrelsome neighbours the Bisharin, the Ababdeh, who are armed with a dagger wrorn in a sheath attached to the upper part of the left arm, or with a long, straight sword, but never with a gun, are exceedingly gentle and inoffensive. The Egyptian government has put an end to the old feuds between the Bisharin and the Ababdeh by entrusting to the latter the superin- tendence of the great commercial route through the Nubian desert (from Korusko to Abu Hammed), and by placing the nine tribes of the Bisharin under the jurisdiction of the chief shekh of the Abab- deh, who is personally responsible for the safety of the routes through the desert, and is therefore obliged to reside in the valley of the Nile. (His present headquarters are at the small village of Behereh, at the foot of the hill of Redesiyeh, opposite to Edfu.) The total number of the Ababdeh amounts to about 30,000. The chief shekh whose dignity is hereditary, appoints over the principal vil- lages a number of sub-chiefs, who are appealed to as judges in family quarrels which the head of the family has been unable to settle. The dwellings of the Ababdeh consist of low and miserable hovels constructed of stakes covered with ragged straw-mats, and placed in groups of not more than 4-8 together. They also sometimes live in caves, like genuine Troglodytes, although exposed to danger from snakes. Like the other Bega tribes, they are chiefly occupied as shepherds and camel-drivers. The wealthier purchase a little sorgh- um grain, which they eat either raw, or roasted, or in the form of unleavened cakes, but the poorer seem to have a marvellous power of sustaining life on homceopathically minute quantities of goats’ milk and the game which they occasionally capture. The Bisharin also live exclusively on milk and a little meat, while the Arabian Beduins of the North till the soil to some extent when an opportunity of- fers. A considerable number of the Ababdeh and Bisharin who live near the coast and possess no cattle or other property, subsist precariously on the produce of the sea. They are not fishermen, as