Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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The few and limited spots where the desert or steppe affords water for cultivation require artificial irrigation, the importation of plants, and careful tillage, to make the limited area support even a small social group. Hence they could have been utilized by man only after he had made considerable progress in civilization.1123 Oasis agriculture is predominantly intensive. Gardens and orchards tend to prevail over field tillage. The restricted soil and water must be forced to yield their utmost. While on the rainy or northern slope of the Atlas in Algiers and Tunis farms abound, on the Saharan piedmont are chiefly plantations of vegetables, orchards and palm groves.1124 In Fezzan at the oasis of Ghat, Barth found kitchen gardens of considerable extent, large palm groves, but limited fields of grain, all raised by irrigation; and in the flat hollow basin forming the oasis of Murzuk, he found also fig and peach trees, vegetables, besides fields of wheat and barley cultivated with much labor.1125 In northern Fezzan, where the mountains back of Tripoli provide a supply of water, saffron and olive trees are the staple articles of tillage. The slopes are terraced and irrigated, laid out in orchards of figs, pomegranates, almonds and grapes, while fields of wheat and barley border the lower courses of the wadis.1126 In the "cup oases" or depressions of the Sahara, the village is always built on the slope, because the alluvial soil in the basin is too precious to be used for house sites.1127
The water supply in deserts and steppes, on which permanent agriculture depends, is so scant that even a slight diminution causes the area of tillage to shrink. Here a fluctuation of snowfall or rainfall that in a moist region would be negligible, has conspicuous or even tragic results. English engineers who examined the utilization of the Afghan streams for irrigation reported that the natives had exploited their water supply to the last drop; that irrigation converted the Kabul River and the Heri-rud at certain seasons of the year into dry channels.1128 In the Turkoman steppes it has been observed that expanding tillage, by the multiplication of irrigation canals, increased the loss of water by evaporation, and hence diminished the supply. Facts like these reveal the narrow margin between food and famine, which makes the uncertain basis of life for the steppe agriculturist. Even slight desiccation contracts the volume and shortens the course of interior drainage streams; therefore it narrows the piedmont zone of vegetation and the hem of tillage along the river banks. The previous frontier of field and garden is marked by abandoned hamlets and sand-buried cities, like those which border the dry beds of the shrunken Khotan rivers of the Tarim basin.1129 The steppe regions in the New World as well as the Old show great numbers of these ruins. Barth found them in the northern Sahara, dating from Roman days.1130 They occur in such numbers in the Syrian Desert, in the Sistan of Persia, in Baluchistan, the Gobi, Takla Makan Desert, Turfan and the Lop Nor basin, that they indicate a marked but irregular desiccation of central and western Asia during the historical period.1131
If a scant water supply places sedentary agriculture in arid lands upon an insecure basis, it makes the nomad's sources of subsistence even more precarious. It keeps him persistently on low rations, while the drought that burns his pastures and dries up well and wadi brings him face to face with famine. The daily food of the Bedouin is meal cooked in sour camel's milk, to which bread and meat are added only when guests arrive. His moderation in eating is so great that one meal of a European would suffice for six Arabs.1132 The daily food of the shepherd agriculturists on the Kuen Lun margin of the Takla Makan Desert is bread and milk; meat is indulged in only three or four times a month.1133 The Tartars, even in their days of widest conquest, showed the same habitual frugality. "Their victuals are all things that may be eaten, for we saw some of them eat lice." The flesh of all animals dying a natural death is used as food; in summer it is sun-dried for winter use, because at that time the Tartars live exclusively on mare's milk which is then abundant. A cup or two of milk in the morning suffices till evening, when each man has a little meat. One ram serves as a meal for fifty or a hundred men. Bones are gnawed till they are burnished, "so that no whit of their food may come to naught." Genghis Khan enacted that neither blood nor entrails nor any other part of a beast which might be eaten should be thrown away.1134 Scarcity of food among the Tibetan and Mongolian nomads is reflected in their habit of removing every particle of meat from the bone when eating.1135 A thin decoction of hot tea, butter and flour is their staple food. Many Turkoman nomads, despite outward appearance of wealth, eat only dried fish, and get bread only once a month, while for the poor wheat is prohibited on account of its cost.1136 The Saharan Tibbus, usually on a starvation diet, eat the skin and powdered bones of their dead animals.1137
The privations and hardships of life in the deserts and steppes discourage obesity. The Koko-Nor Mongols of the high Tibetan plateau are of slight build, never fat.1138 The Bedouin's physical ideal of a man is spare, sinewy, energetic and vigorous, "lean-sided and thin," as the Arab poet expresses it.1139 The nomadic tribesmen throughout the Sahara, whether of Hamitic, Semitic or Negro race, show this type, and retain it even after several generations of settlement in the river valleys of the Sudan. The Bushmen, who inhabit the Kalahari Desert, have thin wiry forms and are capable of great exertion and privations.1140
Though the conquering propensities of nomadic tribes make large families desirable, in order to increase the military strength of the horde, and though shepherd folk acquiring new and rich pastures develop patriarchal families, as did the Jews after the conquest of Canaan, nevertheless the limited water and food supply of desert and grassland, as well as the relatively low-grade economy of pastoral life, impose an iron-bound restriction upon population, so that as a matter of fact patriarchal families are rare. When natural increase finds no vent in emigration and dispersal, marriage among nomads becomes less fruitful.1141 Artificial limitation of population occurs frequently among desert-dwellers. In the Libyan oasis of Farafeah, the inhabitants never exceed eighty males, a limit fixed by a certain Sheik Murzuk.1142 Poverty of food supply explains the small number of children in the typical Turkoman family. Among the Koko-Nor Tibetans, monogamy is the rule, polygamy the exception and confined to the few rich, while families never include more than two or three children.1143 According to Burckhardt, three children constitute a large family among the Bedouins, much to the regret of the Bedouins themselves. Mohammedans though they are, few practice polygamy, while polyandry and female infanticide existed in heathen times.1144 Desert peoples seem to be naturally monogamous.1145
The prevailing poverty, monotony and unreliability of subsistence in desert and steppe, as well as the low industrial status, necessitate trade with bordering agricultural lands. The Bedouins of Arabia buy flour, barley for horse feed, coffee and clothing, paying for them largely with butter and male colts. The northern tribes resort every year to the confines of Syria, when they are visited by pedlers from Damascus and Aleppo.1146 The tribes from Hasa and the Nejd pasture land bring horses, cattle and sheep to the city of Koweit at the head of the Persian Gulf to barter for dates, clothing and firearms; and large encampments of them are always to be seen near this town.1147 Arabia and the Desert of Kedar sold lambs, rams and goats to the markets of ancient Tyre.1148 The pastoral tribes of ancient Judea in times of scarcity went to Egypt for grain, which they purchased either with money or cattle. The picture of Jacob's sons returning from Egypt to Canaan with their long lines of asses laden with sacks of corn is typical for pastoral nomads; so is their ultimate settlement, owing to protracted famine, in the delta land of Goshen. The Kirghis of the Russian and Asiatic steppes barter horses and sheep for cereals, fine articles of clothing, and coarse wooden utensils in the cities of Bukhara and the border districts of Russia. Occasionally the land of the nomad yields other products than those of the flocks and herds, which enter therefore into their trade. Such is the salt of the Sahara, secured at Taudeni and Bilma, the gums of the Indus desert, and balm of Gilead from the dry plateau east of Jordan.
The systematic migrations of nomads, their numerous beasts of burden, and the paucity of desert and steppe products determine pastoral tribes for the office of middlemen;1149 and as such they appear in all parts of the world. The contrast of products in arid regions and in the bordering agricultural land, as also in the districts on opposite sides of these vast barriers, stimulates exchanges. This contrast may rest on a difference of geographic conditions, or of economic development, or both. The reindeer Chukches of Arctic Siberia take Russian manufactured wares from
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