Yes, that’s camel jumping, not humping, although I suspect more camels get humped by other camels than get jumped over by young men. There is a beautiful montage of photographs by Ed Ou, who recently visited Bayt al-Faqih in the Yemeni Tihama; for details and the full selection of 14 photographs, check out the New York Times LENS blog for May 9.
The famous dragons blood tree; Photo by Valerio Pandolfo
Revolution in Socotra: A Perspective from Yemen’s Periphery
by Nathalie Peutz, Middle East Report #263, Summer 2012.
At the beginning of 2012, as Egyptians and Syrians marked the second year of their revolts, protesters also took to the streets of Hadiboh, the tumbledown capital of Yemen’s Socotra archipelago (pop. approx. 50,000). Like demonstrators elsewhere, the Socotrans were calling for both local administrative change and national political reform. While the Socotran protests, occurring since March 2011, were small, they were no less significant than the more spectacular rallies in the epicenters of Arab revolution. Indeed, the spread of revolution to Socotra, the largest and most populated of the archipelago’s four islands, shows the extent to which the events of 2011 have resonated even at the very margins of the Arab world. Moreover, it demonstrates how socially and culturally empowering these events have been for a people who have long been politically subjugated, economically marginalized and, unlike many in mainland Yemen, unarmed.
For if revolution has reached Socotra, as many young enthusiasts in Hadiboh would claim, it is manifest not merely in the biweekly gatherings of male protesters marching through the dusty market to the familiar slogan, “The people want the fall of the regime.†It is evident also in the way that Socotrans have begun to speak openly and forcefully about their preferences for Socotra’s political future. And it was measurable in the islands’ largest cultural event, a five-day festival during which nine Socotran wordsmiths vied for the title of “poet of the year.†Now in its fourth year, the festival, which began on the eve of 2012, featured poem after poem, in the islanders’ native Suqutri tongue, reflecting on the Arab revolts, the turmoil on the mainland and the fate of the archipelago. Where political discontent long found expression in ruminations on a pastoral past, today it is articulated in contending verses on the prospects for Socotran sovereignty.
For the full article, click here to read it on the MERIP website.
The largest, and to date the most significant, of more than 300 artifacts found so far at al-Magar is a sculpture fragment whose head, muzzle, nostrils, arched neck, shoulder, withers and overall proportions resemble those of a horse, though it may represent an ass, an onager or a hybrid. Eighty-six centimeters (34″) long, 18 centimeters (7″) thick and weighing more than 135 kilograms (300 lbs), it is provisionally dated to about 7000 bce.
The latest issue of Saudi ARAMCO World (May/June 2012) has a fascinating article about archaeological finds at the site of Magar in southwestern Saudi Arabia. It features an early sculpture of a horse, among other artifacts.
In Monday’s Washington Post there is a report that the paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey is predicting that in another 15-3o years the evidence for evolution will be so overwhelming that creationists who believe in a literal Adam and Eve (which includes about half of the American public, according to opinion polls) will finally throw in the towel. Would that it were so, but the evidence has been overwhelming for well over a hundred years. Every aspect of scientific discovery since Darwin rests on the assumption that life, and indeed all matter, has evolved over a process that involves millions of years. There is not a shred of evidence for the old Bishop Ussher chronology that it all began in a garden called Eden with a lump of clay, a serpent, a couple of symbolic trees and a refashioned rib; not a shred. Push back that divine origin story several thousand years and there is no difference.
If I am still around in another 15-35 years I do not expect the ardent creationists to be any less active. They continue because of an ideology that refuses to accept that the Bible is myth and not the inspired science and history of a rather old and unconvincing idea of God. Creationists do not approach science with an open mind, so they will not be convinced no matter what scientific evidence there is. The theology of the creationists has not changed. Take this old “history of the world” text book I have from the early part of the 19th century (the title page is missing, but the last information is for 1815). It may very well have been one of those books that Abraham Lincoln sought as a child for his own education. I include here the first section, which takes the sacred history of Genesis as real history. This was a book used in the public schools before Darwin published his revolutionary Origin of Species, not a religious tract. Science has come a long way, notwithstanding David Hume’s contributions not long before this book came out; creationists have not and never will.
As begun in a previous post, here is another excerpt from Philip J. Baldensperger’s The Immovable East, published in 1913, and available for free as a pdf at archive.org.
Shit happens but Manure Matters. The latter is the title of a recently published anthology, edited by Richard Jones for Ashgate with details about the historical use of manure in Europe, India and the Arab World. My own contribution to the volume is entitled “Zibl and ZirÄ‘a: Coming to Terms with Manure in Arab Agriculture,” (pp. 129-143).
Here is the description of the book, as posted on Ashgate’s website:
This book brings together the work of a group of international scholars working on social, cultural, and economic issues relating to past manure and manuring. Contributors use textual, linguistic, archaeological, scientific and ethnographic evidence as the basis for their analyses. The scope of the papers is temporally and geographically broad; they span the Neolithic through to the modern period and cover studies from the Middle East, Britain and Atlantic Europe, and India. Together they allow us to explore the signatures that manure and manuring have left behind, and the vast range of attitudes that have surrounded both substance and activity in the past and present.
Contents: Why manure matters, Richard Jones; Science and practice: the ecology of manure in historical retrospect, Robert Shiel; Middening and manuring in Neolithic Europe: issues of plausibility, intensity and archaeological method, Amy Bogaard; (Re)cycles of life in late Bronze Age southern Britain, Kate Waddington; Organic geochemical signatures of ancient manure use, Ian Bull and Richard Evershed; Dung and stable manure on waterlogged archaeological occupation sites: some ruminations on the evidence from plant and invertebrate remains, Harry Kenward and Allan Hall; Manure and middens in English place-names, Paul Cullen and Richard Jones; The formation of anthropogenic soils across three marginal landscapes on Fair Isle and in The Netherlands and Ireland, Ben Pears; Zibl and zira’a: coming to terms with manure in Arab agriculture, Daniel Varisco; Understanding medieval manure, Richard Jones; Lost soles: ethnographic observations on manuring practices in a Mediterranean community, Hamish Forbes; Manure, soil and the Vedic literature: agricultural knowledge and practice on the Indian subcontinent over the last two millennia, Vanaja Ramprasad; Postscript, Richard Jones; Bibliography; Index.
by Iona Craig, The National, January 9, 2012
A Swedish adventurer crossing Yemen by camel hopes his journey will encourage tourists to see beyond the political turmoil and violence that has engulfed the country for nearly a year.
Mikael Strandberg set out on December 7 on a 380-kilometre trek across the treacherous highlands, the first leg of his Yemen venture, to disprove the purveyors of pessimism.
“I don’t know what they [the tourists] are waiting for … it is such a wonderful country with great potential,” he said, after arriving in Sanaa after a two-week march through the toughest terrain in the Arabian Peninsula.
Along with two Yemeni companions, Mr Strandberg is in the initial phase of a journey that will cross the country from the western coastal plains of Hodeida to the edge of the world’s largest sand desert, the Rub’ Al Khali, or Empty Quarter, and beyond to Oman.
The explorer, 48, who fell in love with both the country and his wife Pamela, an American, during a visit to
Yemen three years ago, holds fond memories of Sanaa and the Yemeni people.
“We decided to go and try to make a difference and give a different perspective from the one portrayed by the media,” said Mr Strandberg. Continue reading A Swede and a camel in Yemen
Mahri camels at the International Festival of the Sahara in Douz, Tunisia,
December 24, 2012. Photo by Sam Liebhaber.
by Sam Liebhaber
One of the long-standing myths of Berber ancestry places their origins in Yemen from whence they were dispatched to North Africa in the service of ancient Ḥimyarite kings. Although this chapter in the mythological prehistory of the Arab world can be refuted on the grounds that the Berber are indisputably indigenous to North Africa, the offhand dismissal of the South Arabian-Berber imaginary overlooks an important sociolinguistic kinship between the Berber of North Africa and one of the last indigenous linguistic communities of the Arabian Peninsula: the Mahra of Yemen and Oman.
A number of socio-cultural parallels distinguish the Berber and Mahra from the other minority language communities of the Middle East. For one, the Mahra and Berber are members of the Islamic ʾummah, unlike many of the other minority language communities of the Arab world where linguistic boundaries are frequently coterminous with religious divisions. Further, the Berber and the Mahra did not inherit a written tradition that includes religious and literary texts. As a consequence, the Mahri and Berber languages are frequently consigned to the category of “lahja,†an Arabic term that signifies any non-prestigious, vernacular idiom that lacks of historical or social value.
Without their own written history or affiliation to a prestigious, non-Arab civilization, the Mahra and Berber are more easily “willed†into historical narratives of “Arabness†(Ê¿urÅ«ba) than the other language minority communities of the Arab world. This motif is the mainstay of modern Arabic scholarship on Berber and Mahri genealogical and language origins. A sample of a few recent titles demonstrates this point: The Berber: Ancient Arabs (al-Barbar: Ê¿Arab qudÄmÄ, al-Ê¿ArbÄwÄ«, Tunis: 2000), The Arabness of the Berber: The Hidden Truth (Ê¿UrÅ«bat al-Barbar: al-ḤaqÄ«qa al-MaghmÅ«ra, MÄdÅ«n, Damascus: 1992), Comprehension of Arabic and the Secret of the Mahri Language (Fiqh al-Ê¿Arabiyya wa-sirr al-lugha al-mahriyya, al-Ways, Sana’a: 2004) and Ancient Arabic and its Dialects (ie, Mahri, al-Ê¿Arabiyya al-qadÄ«ma wa-lahajÄtuhÄ, MÄrÄ«kh, Abu Dhabi: 2000).
Even if contemporary scholarship on Mahri and Berber origins is problematic, it is conceivable that historical intersections between the Berber and the Mahra gave medieval Arab historians a justifiable basis to propose their common ancestry. Continue reading South Arabia and the Berber Imaginary