§ 3. Arabs and Syrians.
The Arab population falls naturally into two categories, the nomads (bedawi), and the settled Arabs (hadari). The former are the purer in blood, being the direct descendants of the half-savage nomadic tribes who from time immemorial have inhabited the Arabian peninsula, and who to this day dwell in portable tents of black goats' hair ('the tents of Kedar'). The camps of the different tribes vary in form: some, such as those of the Taʾamireh, are as a rule rectangular, others are circular, others oval. Small in numbers, the tribes generally avoid open places for their camps, not only for shelter but in order not to be conspicuous; for similar reasons they pitch their camps at some distance from their watering places. Natural caves in the wadis are preferred by some families (e.g. at Mar Saba), as they afford better shelter and protection. There is little or no cohesion between the various tribes. Their watering places are springs, standing pools of rain water, and cisterns roughly cut in the rock in the valley bottoms. On the border between 'the desert and the sown' the people tend to change their mode of life; the nomads become partly or wholly sedentary, the sedentary become semi-nomadic. Thus the people on the western edge of the Judaean Desert, as, for example, the Taʾamireh, who were originally fellahin, take their cattle out into the desert and live a nomadic life; on the other hand, genuine Beduin in the desert regions, such as the Rashaʾiden of ʾAin Jidi, remain so long in certain places as to become almost sedentary.
The Beduin are for the most part Moslems, but are on the whole less devout than the settled Arabs. Some of the Beduin, especially around Salt and Madaba in Trans-jordania, still retain the Christianity which they adopted in the early centuries of the Christian era.
A negroid element is found among the inhabitants of the tropical Ghor region in the lower Jordan Valley and around the Dead Sea. The presence of these people is attributed by some to a settlement from the Sudan, by others to the
