Desert markets.
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 Gaza[1156] 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.
Nomad industries.
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]
Oriental rugs.
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]