Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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If the camel is "the ship of the desert," the market towns on the margin of the sandy wastes are the ports of the desert. Their bazaars hold everything that the nomad needs. Their suburbs are a shifting series of shepherd encampments or extensive caravanseries for merchant and pack animal, like the abaradion of Timbuctoo, which receives annually from fifty to sixty thousand camels.1154 Their industries develop partly in response to the demand of the desert or trans-desert population. The fine blades of Damascus reflected the Bedouin's need of the best weapon. Each city has its sphere of desert influence. The province of Nejd in Central Arabia is commercially subservient to Bagdad, Busrah, Koweit and Bahrein.1155 The bazaars of Samarkand and Tashkent exist largely for the scattered nomads of Turkestan. Ancient Gaza1156 and Askelon fattened on the Egyptian trade across the Desert of Shur, as Petra, Bostra and Damascus on the thin but steady streams of nomad products flowing in from the Syrian Desert.
The abundant leisure of nomadic life encourages the beginning of industry, but rarely advances it beyond the household stage, owing to the thin, family-wise dispersion of population which precludes division of labor. Such industry as exists consists chiefly in working up the raw materials yielded by the herds. Among the Bedouins, blacksmiths and saddlers are the only professional artisans; these are regarded with contempt and are never of Bedouin stock.1157 In the ancient world, industry reached its zero point in Arabia, and in modern times shows meager development there. On the other hand the Saharan Arabs developed an hereditary guild of expert well-makers, which seems to date back to remote times, and is held in universal honor.1158
It is to the tent-dwellers of the world, however, that we apparently owe the oriental rug. This triumph of the weaver's art seems to have originated among pastoral nomads, who developed it in working up the wool and hair of their sheep, goats and camels; but it early became localized as a specialized industry in the towns and villages of irrigated districts on the borders of the grazing lands, where the nomads had advanced to sedentary life. Therefore in the period of the Caliphate, from 632 to 1258, we find these brilliant flowers of the loom, blooming like the Persian gardens, in Persian Farsistan, Khusistan, Kirman and Khorasan. We find them spreading the mediæval fame of Shiraz, Tun, Meshed, Amul, Bukhara and Merv. The secret of this preeminence lay partly in the weaver's inherited aptitude and artistic sense for this textile work, derived from countless generations of shepherd ancestors; partly in their proximity to the finest raw materials, whose quality was equalled nowhere else, because it depended upon the character of the pasturage, probably also upon the climatic conditions affecting directly the flocks and herds.1159
A map showing the geographical distribution of Eastern rug-making reveals the relation of the industry to semi-arid or saline pastures, and makes the mind revert at once to the blankets of artistic design and color, woven by the Navajo Indians of our own rainless Southwest. Rug weaving in the Old World reached its finest development in countries like Persia, Turkestan, western Afghanistan, Baluchistan, western India and the plateau portions of Asia Minor, countries where the rainfall varies from 10 to 20 inches or even less, [See map page 484.] where nomadism claims a considerable part of the population, and where the ancestry of all traces back to some of the great shepherd races, like Turkomans and Tartars. These peoples are hereditary specialists in the care, classification, and preparation of wools.1160 Weavers of rugs form an industrial class in the cities of Persia and Asia Minor, where they obey largely the taste of the outside world in regard to design and color;1161 whereas the nomads, weaving for their own use, adhere strictly to native colors and designs. Their patterns are tribal property, each differing from that of the other; and though less artistic than those of the urban workers, are nevertheless interesting and consistent, while the nomad's intuitive sense of color is fine.1162
The principles of design and color which these tent-dwellers had developed in their weaving, they applied, after their conquest of agricultural lands, to stone and produced the mosaic, to architecture and produced the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal.1163 Whether Saracens of Spain or Turkoman conquerors of India, they were ornamentists whose contribution to architecture was decoration. Working in marble, stone, metals or wood, they wrought always in the spirit of color and textile design, rather than in the spirit of form. The walls of their mosques, palaces and tombs reproduce the beauty of the rugs once screening the doors of their felt tents. The gift of color they passed on to the West, first through the Moors of Sicily and Spain, later through Venetian commerce. Their influence can be seen in the exquisite mosaic decoration in the cloister of Mont Reale of once Saracenic Palermo, and in the Ducal Palace and St. Mark's Cathedral of beauty-loving Venice.1164 This has been almost their sole contribution to the art of the world.
Pastoral nomads can give political union to civilized peoples; they can assimilate and spread ready-made elements of civilization, but to originate or develop them they are powerless. Between the art, philosophy and literature of China on the one side, and of the settled districts of Persia on the other, lies the cultural sterility of the Central Asia plateau. Its outpouring hordes have only in part acquired the civilization of the superior agricultural peoples whom they have conquered; from Kazan and Constantinople to Delhi, from Delhi to Peking they have added almost nothing to the local culture.
Deserts and steppes lay an arresting hand on progress. Their tribes do not develop; neither do they grow old. They are the eternal children of the world. Genuine nomadic peoples show no alteration in their manners, customs or mode of life from millennium to millennium. The interior of the Arabian desert reveals the same social and economic status,1165 whether we take the descriptions of Moses or Mohammed or Burckhardt or more recent travelers. The Bedouins of the Nubian steppes adhere strictly to all their ancient customs, and reproduce to-day the pastoral nomadism of Abraham and Jacob.1166 Genealogies were not more important to the biblical house of David and stem of Jesse than they are for the modern Kirghis tribesman, who as a little child learns to recite the list of his ancestors back to the seventh generation. The account which Herodotus gives of the nomads of the Russian steppes agrees in minute details with that of Strabo written five centuries later,1167 with that of William de Rubruquis in 1253, and with modern descriptions of Kalmuck and Kirghis life. The Gauchos or Indian pastoral halfbreeds of the Argentine plains were found by Wappäus in 1870 to accord accurately with Avara's description of them at the end of the eighteenth century.1168 The restless tenants of the grasslands come and go, but their type never materially changes. Their culture is stationary amid persistent movement. Only when here or there in some small and favored spot they are forced to make the transition to agriculture, or when they learn by long and close association with sedentary nations the lesson of drudgery and progress, do the laws of social and economic development begin to operate in them. As a rule, they must first escape partly or wholly the environment of their pasture lands, either by emigration or by the intrusion into their midst of alien tillers of the soil.
But while the migrant shepherd originates nothing, he plays an historical rôle as a transmitter of civilization. Asiatic nomads have sparsely disseminated the culture of China, Persia, Egypt and Yemen over large areas of the world. The Semite shepherds of the Red Sea deserts, through their merchants and conquerors, long gave to the dark Sudan the only light of civilization which it received, Mohammed, a Bedouin of the Ishmaelite tribe, caravan leader on the desert highways between Mecca and Syria, borrowed from Jerusalem the simple tenets of a monotheistic religion, and spread them through his militant followers over a large part of Africa and Asia.
The deserts and grasslands breed in their sons certain qualities and characteristics-courage, hardihood, the stiff-necked pride of the freeman, vigilance, wariness, sense of locality,1169 keen powers of observation stimulated by the monotonous, featureless environment, and the consequent capacity to grasp every detail.1170 Though robbery abroad is honorable and marauder a term with which to crown a hero, theft at home is summarily dealt with among most nomads. The property of the unlocked tent and the far-ranging herd must be safeguarded.1171 The Tartars maintained a high standard of honesty among themselves and punished theft with death.1172 Wide dispersal in small groups is reflected in the diversity of dialects among desert peoples;1173 in the practice of hospitality, whether among Bedouins of the Nejd, Kirghis of the Central Asia plateau,1174 or semi-nomadic Boers of South Africa;1175 in the persistence of feuds and of the duty of blood revenge, which is sanctioned by the Koran.
Isolation tends to breed among nomads pride of race and a repugnance to intermixture. The ideal of the pastoral Israelites was a
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