The Bedouin of Cyrenaica


Book Description

This collection brings together Emrys Peters' major writings on the Bedouin of Libya.




The Rise of the Fatimids


Book Description

The book traces the rise of the Fatimid dynasty in the 4th century AH/10th century CE, from its origins in Islamic messianism to power in North Africa and Egypt, and a central position of influence throughout the Muslim world. The first part deals with the problem of Fatimid origins, the second with the establishment of the dynasty and its religious and political programme in North Africa, the third with the success of that programme in Egypt. Using the history of the Fatimids and their doctrine to survey the world of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the 4th/10th century, the book offers a new interpretation of the role of the dynasty in the history of Islam down to the period of the Crusades.




The Orange Trees of Marrakesh


Book Description

An examination of Khaldun’s Islamic history of the premodern world, its philosophical underpinnings, and the author himself. In his masterwork Muqaddimah, the Arab Muslim Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), a Tunisian descendant of Andalusian scholars and officials in Seville, developed a method of evaluating historical evidence that allowed him to identify the underlying causes of events. His methodology was derived from Aristotelian notions of nature and causation, and he applied it to create a dialectical model that explained the cyclical rise and fall of North African dynasties. The Muqaddimah represents the world’s first example of structural history and historical sociology. Four centuries before the European Enlightenment, this work anticipated modern historiography and social science. In Stephen F. Dale’s The Orange Trees of Marrakesh, Ibn Khaldun emerges as a cultured urban intellectual and professional religious judge who demanded his fellow Muslim historians abandon their worthless tradition of narrative historiography and instead base their works on a philosophically informed understanding of social organizations. His strikingly modern approach to historical research established him as the premodern world’s preeminent historical scholar. It also demonstrated his membership in an intellectual lineage that begins with Plato, Aristotle, and Galen; continues with the Greco-Muslim philosophers al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes; and is renewed with Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, and Durkheim. Praise for The Orange Trees of Marrakesh “Stephen Dale’s book contains a careful account of the dizzying ups and downs of Ibn Khaldun’s political and academic career at courts in North Africa, Andalusia and Egypt. For these and other reasons The Orange Trees of Marrakesh deserves careful and respectful attention.” —Robert Irwin, The Times Literary Supplement (UK) “Historian Stephen Frederic Dale argues that Ibn Khaldun’s work is a key milestone on the road from Greek to Enlightenment thought, chiming with the radical reasoning of philosophers such as Montesquieu and Adam Smith.” —Barbara Kiser, Nature “Dale’s interest in Greco-Islamic philosophy contributes to this biography’s uniqueness . . . This work provides indispensable background information to truly appreciate this single most influential Islamic historian.” —R. W. Zens, Choice “Excellent scholarship on a fascinating subject.” —Publishers Weekly




Livestock Development In Subsaharan Africa


Book Description

The nations of Subsaharan Africa experienced declining levels of food production per capita throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly in the area of livestock production. Addressing that problem, the authors of this book assess in a systems context the environmental, biological, and social constraints on future African livestock development and consider prospects for improving productivity, They focus especially on changes needed in production and marketing systems, pointing to important policy considerations . The book is divided into four parts containing twenty-one chapters, each authored by one or more respective authorities in his or her field. Each section in its own way addresses the entire set of questions; topics include aspects of animal breeding and nutrition, anthropology, economics, ecology, farming systems, governmental policy, land tenure, marketing, modelling, and veterinary medicine.




Subsistence Strategies and Craft Production at the Ancient Egyptian Ramesside Fort of Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham


Book Description

Drawing on more than 20 years of archaeological study and investigation at Zawiyet Umm el-Rakham by a team from the University of Liverpool (led by Professor Steven Snape), this book paints a nuanced picture of daily life not only at this liminal military site, but also in Ramesside Egypt more broadly. Constructed during the reign of Ramesses II, the fortified settlement was situated 300 kilometres west of Alexandria and represents the furthest western outpost of the Egyptian New Kingdom empire. Excavations in Area K of the fortress have uncovered extensive evidence for the living arrangements, minor industries, food production and daily life of the fort's inhabitants. This previously unpublished material forms the bedrock of this volume, which focuses on analysing the various subsistence and craft production strategies that were conducted alongside each other in this area, from baking, brewing and butchery to lithics working, bone-carving and weaving. These traces of the activities of the soldiers and their families shed new light on what life was like at this military installation and for ordinary Egyptians more widely, shifting away from a focus on elite social groups. The archaeological evidence covered in this book prompts a re-evaluation of the realities of the relationship between Egyptians and Libyans at the close of the Late Bronze Age. The purpose of the fortress' construction was primarily defensive, however the surviving material points to co-operation by means of collaborative farming and trading, and provides a direct counterpoint to the more belligerent contemporary royal monumental inscriptions describing Egypto-Libyan relations.




Mobility and Territoriality


Book Description

Territorial behaviour among various herders and hunter-gatherers has been discussed in earlier studies, but this is the first time that a comparison of these three types of mobile populations has been attempted. The original papers presented in this volume discuss the conditions and problems of securing access to resources among pastoralists, peripatetics, and hunting, gathering and fishing communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. A comprehensive introductory chapter places these empirical studies in a broader theoretical context of the behaviourial sciences.




Revolutions in the Desert


Book Description

Revolutions in the Desert investigates the development of pastoral nomadism in the arid regions of the ancient Near East, challenging the prevailing notion that such societies left few remains appropriate for analytic study. Few prior studies have approached the deeper past of desert nomadic societies, which have been primarily recognized only as a complement to the study of sedentary agricultural societies in the region. Based on decades of archaeological field work in the Negev of southern Israel, both excavations and surveys, and integrating materials from adjacent regions, Revolutions in the Desert offers a deeper and more dynamic view of the rise of herding societies beyond the settled zone. Rosen offers the first archaeological analysis of the rise of herding in the desert, from the first introduction of domestic goats and sheep into the arid zones, more than eight millennia ago, to the evolution of more recent Bedouin societies. The adoption of domestic herds by hunter-gatherer societies, contemporary with and peripheral to the first farming settlements, revolutionized all aspects of desert life, including subsistence, trade, cult, social organization, and ecology. Inviting processual comparison to the agricultural revolution and the secondary spread of domestication beyond the Near East, this volume traces the evolution of nomadic societies in the archaeological record and examines their ecological, economic and social adaptations to the deserts of the Southern Levant. With maps and illustrations from the author’s own collection, Revolutions in the Desert is a thoughtful and engaging approach to the archaeology of desert nomadic societies.




Bedouin, Settlers, and Holiday-makers


Book Description

""A new e-book edition of the classic study of the radical changes in lifestyle, trade, agriculture, and land use that have taken place on Egypt's northwest coast in the face of a huge influx of Nile Valley settlers and touristsThe arid regions impose strict limits upon human existence and activity. And yet by respecting those limits, the flourishing and stable culture of these regions has for centuries been sustained. In the late twentieth century, however, forces such as modernization, globalization, and the politics and economics of nations became so great that major changes in the old ways.




Veiled Sentiments


Book Description

First published in 1986, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments has become a classic ethnography in the field of anthropology. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But Abu-Lughod’s analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the complexity of culture. This thirtieth anniversary edition includes a new afterword that reflects on developments both in anthropology and in the lives of this community of Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, who find themselves increasingly enmeshed in national political and social formations. The afterword ends with a personal meditation on the meaning—for all involved—of the radical experience of anthropological fieldwork and the responsibilities it entails for ethnographers.




The Ecology And Economic Impact Of Poisonous Plants On Livestock Production


Book Description

First published in 1988. Livestock poisoning by plants has been a problem to the livestock producers of the United States since our pioneer forefathers first grazed their herds of cattle and sheep on the vast rangelands and pastures of this country. It has long been recognized that poisonous plants are not only disruptive to the harvesting of the