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Updated: August 26, 2024
The Egyptian commissioners are vainly endeavouring to restore peace and order, like General Gordon in the Soudan, while Babylonians and Mitannians, Hittites and Beduin are assailing the distracted province. The Asiatic empire of the eighteenth dynasty, however, did not wholly perish with the death of Khu-n-Aten.
Beduin place names too have a charm of their own. Hod um Ugba for instance officially translated as "the depression in the sand full of palm trees of Mother Ugba." When we visited it, it was almost equally full of dead horses. It was pathetic to think of old Mother Ugba squatting in a concentration camp on the Canal and dreaming of the obscure charms of her beloved hod!
Or did she lead her tribe in the host of Saladin against the Crusaders and let the Saracens down as treacherously as she ambushed the Christians. Old de Joinville in his thirteenth century Chronicle of the Crusades has much to say of the Beduin. "Their belief is," he tells us, "that no man can die save on the day appointed and for this reason they will not wear armour."
The Beduin had a handsome wife; and frequently, when he went on his courses, he left my brother alone with her, and then she used all her endeavours to comfort my brother under the rigour of his slavery: she gave him tokens enough that she loved him; but he durst not yield to her passion, for fear he should repent it, and therefore he shunned to be alone with her, as much as she sought the opportunity to be alone with him.
There are several letters in the Tel el-Amarna collection from the latter official, chiefly occupied with demands for help against his enemies. The district under his control was attacked by the Sute or Beduin, led by a certain Labai or Labaya and his sons.
The Beduin of to-day are the Amalekites of Old Testament history; and then, as now, they infested the southern frontier of Judah, wasting and robbing the fields of the husbandman, and allying themselves with every invader who came from the south, Saul, indeed, punished them, as Romans and Turks have punished them since; but the lesson is remembered only for a short while: when the strong hand is removed, the "sons of the desert" return again like the locusts to their prey.
We find the Pharaohs of the third dynasty already establishing their garrisons and colonies of miners in the province of Mafkat, as they called it, and slaughtering the Beduin who interfered with them. The history of Naram-Sin shows that its conquest was equally an object of the Babylonian monarchs at the very outset of their history.
Next it was Egypt which entered upon its career of Asiatic conquest, and Canaan for a while was an Egyptian province. But the Egyptian dominion in its turn passed away, and Palestine was left the prey of other assailants, of the Hittites and the Beduin, of the people of Aram Naharaim and the northern hordes.
Here they multiplied and grew wealthy, until the evil days came when the Egyptians rose up against Semitic influence and control, and Ramses II. transformed the free-born Beduin into public serfs. But the age of Ramses II. was still far distant when Jacob died full of years, and his mummy was carried to the burial-place of his fathers "in the land of Canaan."
In Algiers he might easily have heard it recited by the tale-tellers. Kanmakan is the typical Arab Knight, gentle and valiant as Don Quixote Sabbah is the Grazioso, a "Beduin" Sancho Panza. In the "Romance of Antar" we have a similar contrast with Ocab who says: "Indeed I am no fighter: the sword in my hand-palm chases only pelicans ;" and, "whenever you kill a satrap, I'll plunder him."
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