All posts by tabsir

Lithographic Camels

I am a fan of 19th century lithographs of images about the Middle East. One of the books with a plethora of such images is Story of the Bible Animals by the Rev. J. G. Wood, published in 1888 and available on archive.org. In the 700 pages of this book, the largest space (pp. 248-290) is devoted to the camel, drawing on traveler accounts. It is a fun read, full of all the Orientalist prejudices you might image. For example:

“As to the movement of the animal, it is at first as unpleasant as can be conceived, and has been described by several travellers, some of whose accounts will be here given. One well-known traveller declares that any person desiring to practice Camel-riding can readily do so by taking a music-stool, screwing it up as high as possible, putting it into a cart without springs, sitting on the top of it cross-legged, and having the cart driven at full speed transversely over a newly ploughed field.”

Thesiger of Arabia

Anyone who knows anything about Arabia has no doubt heard of Lawrence of Arabia, even if only via Peter O’toole’s dazzling Hollywood version.  But there is also Thesiger of Arabia, especially his extraordinary trips across the Empty Quarter in the 1940s.  While in al-‘Ayn in 2014 I was able to visit the old fort, now a museum displaying a number of photographs that Wilfred Thesiger took on his trip from Yemen to the Emirates and his visit with Shaykh Zayed.  The albums of Thesiger are preserved online at the Pitt Rivers Museum website.  It is well worth looking at these.

I photographed several of the images in the al-‘Ayn exhibit dealing with Yemen, and these are reproduced below:

Sa’ar at Minwakh, Hadramawt, drawing water (1947)
Sa’ar watering at Minwakh, Hadramawt (1947-48), showing Thesiger’s goatskin water bags
Mahra boy
Sa’ar tent (1947-48)