Dating the Arrival of the Bedouin Tribes in Sinai and the Negev

Abstract

In any desert region for which few if any governmental or other documents exist, trying to date the events that transpired there among the inhabitants themselves is difficult. Accordingly, historians attempting to reconstruct the history of the bedouin in Sinai and the Negev have had little success in determining when the ancestors of the present bedouin population arrived there'). While a list of tribes compiled by the German explorer, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, in 1807, instructs us that all the major groups presently there were already there by the early nineteenth century2), the only older documents known to scholars until recently made mention of but a few. The first such document was the tenth century geographical treatise, Sifat Jazirat al-CArab, written by al-Hasan ibn Ahmad alHamdanT (d. 945). It mentions the Bill and Bayyadhlyin tribes still found in northern Sinai3), and presumed to have been there at least